


Tommy Pays for It

by wysiwygot



Category: Warrior (2011)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Death by Friendly Fire, Drug Addiction, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Sex, Escort Service, F/M, MMA, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sex Work, U.S. Marines, War is hell, opiate addiction, toxic masculinity, walking wounded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2019-08-24 14:08:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 41,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16641645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wysiwygot/pseuds/wysiwygot
Summary: Tommy Riordan (formerly Conlon) winds up paying for it. Blame it on the Oxy or blame it on the beet smoothies — whatever gets you through the night. Takes place pre-canon, after the desertion but before Tommy shows up on Paddy's doorstep in Pittsburgh.





	1. Round One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheAstronomer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAstronomer/gifts).



> There is what I very much intended to be a respectful depiction and treatment of sex work (namely, escorts) in this fic. If consensual, adult characters engaging in sex for money upsets you, please keep it to yourself.
> 
> That's the biggest content warning. There is also some description of violence, both in the ring and wartime, there is mention of a secondary character's canonical death, there's a lot of naughty language and also some Spanish that is untranslated, and several mentions of PTSD-related panic attacks, drug abuse, familial abuse and alcoholism.

Tommy Riordan blamed the loss on the Oxy. Not only did it bind up the works like a sonofabitch but it made his muscles feel heavy. Slow. OK for a rest day when he wasn’t training for a fight, maybe, when he could relax and sleep off another shitty day on his single bed, but definitely not OK on a day that he needed to knock the shit out of of some dickhead named Mikey so he could qualify to fight in the cage the following weekend.

He knew the Oxy was a problem. But it was also a cure, so fuck it. He needed it. Any time he went off it, Tommy’s back and his knee would give him utter hell. Nothing else touched the pain when it got real bad, either—not Percocet, not his beloved Darvocet, not fistfuls of ibuprofen. And don’t even fuckin’ come at him with that Aleve crap. That shit doesn’t work at all. 

You know what chronic pain is like? It’s like being trapped in a tank. That’s sinking in water. In an electrical storm. While taking heavy fire. And you’re wearing 65 extra pounds of combat gear. Except no one’s coming to save you. No one.

You know what pain pills are, really, in that situation? They’re a pair of pretty, glowing wings that take Tommy up and out of that hell.

They are good for that. But they don’t help him at all in a fight.

The Oxy and all the various -cets also fuck with his dick, especially when they’re paired with booze—Tommy’s favorite way to spend an evening. Shit like that fucks with a guy’s hormones. But that’s not all! Inhibited testosterone not only fucks with Tommy’s junk but it also interferes with his ability to put on muscle. Ain’t that a bitch? Less muscle mass, chubby tits, and fewer boners. Great. Sign me up, coach.

Tommy gets why some guys turn to steroids, to just taking cocktails made up of HGH, T … all that shit. They’re not for Tommy—his liver was barely hanging on as it was—but they make some sense. Because training is a pain in the ass, especially when you don’t have a coach and you don’t have any money and you don’t know how to talk to doctors about what’s wrong with you and you wake up drenched in sweat and sometimes you can’t stop shaking and women are scared of you. 

Wait, what was the question? Oh right: training. It sucks. It’s great if you like to eat entire flocks of chicken and never-ending gardens of steamed broccoli. But if you don’t, it fucking sucks. It’s boring as shit, for one. Also, you smell weird, everything hurts, and the best-case scenario is that bigger and meaner guys always want to fight you.

You know what helps? Beet juice. No shit. Beet juice. It’s almost like a natural steroid, the way it kicks up your own body’s testosterone production. You can buy beet powder by the canister, too, and it don’t cost much. Mix it up with water and gulp it down—you’re good. Tastes like actual dirt and make it look like you’re shitting blood, but it helps your body make testosterone. So, again, fuck it.

Anyway, Tommy ran out of beet powder before Mikey mopped the floor with him. He didn’t have anything to counteract the opiate interference with his endocrine system. That’s why he lost the fight, and that’s probably why he couldn’t get a fucking boner to save his life for a while there.

So, the new rule was: No Oxy—OK, maybe just one a day to take the edge off—10 days before a fight. And nothing but beet powder smoothies and ibuprofen for three days before the actual fight. 

Starting next week, next qualifier fight. If there was one. 

 

You can imagine Tommy’s surprise the next month, when he lost another fight. Even with the beet powder smoothies. Even with the reduced opioid usage. He just fucking lost. He didn’t merely lose, either, he had his ass fucking handed to him by a Muay Thai genius who outmaneuvered Tommy like a hummingbird would a hippo. The guy used Tommy’s own bulk against him and pinned him before he even knew what was up. Nothing got hurt but his pride, but that hurt kind of a lot.

What you can’t imagine, though, is Tommy’s surprise at how outrageously, hilariously, and frustratingly horny he got after he lost that second fight. It had nothing to do with the fight itself—at least it didn’t feel like it. It felt … chemical. Almost ike an allergic reaction, like the one he had to Zoloft. Except, instead of hives, he felt himself getting teenager-levels of horny.

Tommy Riordan (the name he was going by these days) needed to nut. 

Or beat the fuck out of someone, maybe. Like, outside of the ring. Go ham on some asshole’s face. That, though … that was a bad idea. Law enforcement would never side with him, no matter what, not even if they were MMA fans, and if they took him in, they’d find out what he’d done—how he’d skipped out on the rest of his service like a punk. He’d be locked up. No help to Pilar or the kids. No way to honor Manny or the sacrifice he made. Tommy would be in prison for the next ten years. And, if he really put a beating on some asshole at a bar, he’d probably get another ten.

Not worth it. Better to just get laid.

But how? Girls didn’t hardly even look at him anymore. Well, they did, but not in the way he wanted just then. They looked at him like he was scary. Like he was going to knock them over, steal their purse. He knew he didn’t make things any better by how he dressed himself, or how he carried himself. But all that shit was just meaningless. He wore what fit him, training or not. He wore what was comfortable, what helped him fade into the background. He wasn’t some flash motherfucker who needed to walk around like a goddamn peacock in tailored shirts or new shoes. He needed to be warm. Keep a low profile. So, most of the time, he didn’t care that girls didn’t look at him. Until he did.

There were girls at the bars he went to, sometimes. When he had enough money to blow it in a bar, he saw those girls. What they were doing in old man dives like the ones Tommy liked, he didn’t know. Someone said that that hipster shit had come around full circle, that the kids were drinking in places that had no doors on the toilet stalls and peanut casings on the floor. Shithole dives were cool again. Paying $3 for a Bud heavy and a .5-ounce bag of potato chips was all the rage, especially after spending $7 for a Bud Light uptown. 

But the girls were hipsters, too. Glossy show-offs. Hanging onto their skinny-ass boyfriends with names like Ethan and Travis, playing pool and gawking at the rest of the old drunks and the losers, who had names like Bill and Howard, Davey. Clarence. (Or Tommy.) Those young girls, they came with their boyfriends (if they came at all, amirite?), not with their friends. And what was Tommy supposed to do about that? Make eyes at some girl when Travis was right there?

The women at those bars, the ones who were Tommy’s age or older, they were also not for him. They—the Sheilas and Sharons and Carols—were there to play video poker or toast to better years with their drunk husbands. Some of them were drunks themselves, sloppy and falling apart. Lipstick a little crooked, a few extra pounds around the middle, tits hoisted up with industrial-grade brassieres. They were sad. They reminded Tommy of Paddy. Of his pops. There but for the grace of God—no, literally, she was devout—would have gone Tommy’s mom, too, if she’d stayed with Paddy. She could have gotten the cancer treated by the VA, only to end up parked on a stool, listening to his pops drone on about Chu Lai. That is, if she hadn’t have taken off in the middle of the night. If they hadn’t taken off in the middle of the night.

Were some of the women at the bar prostitutes? Tommy didn’t know. Didn’t seem like the kind of thing you could or should ask a person. How would it come up in casual conversation, even? “Hello, madam. I’m hoping to exchange a couple of Benjamins for a half an hour with your mouth … but not in a rude way.”

After the Muay Thai massacre, someone in the locker room mentioned escorts and Tommy’s ears perked up. The guy was making jokes about escorts, like guys do, but it was clear that he was no stranger to hiring one. 

“Roll your dice on Craigslist, if you want,” he told his friend, “but when you want in and out with no complications, call an escort.” 

Escort is what they call whores now, Tommy gathered. Working girls? Escorts weren’t walking the streets, looking for clients, the guy said—they were better, classier. You could just call and order them up, like you would a pizza. “What kind of topping you want? Blond? Thin crust or thick? Spicy or mild? Plus, just like a pizza, an escort isn’t going to follow you around, telling you they love you.”

Cue laughter from the other asshole. The escort guy, just some dipshit that Tommy didn’t really know, talking about women as if they were delivery food made him feel sick. And yet.

And yet.

“Yeah but …” Tommy pulled his soggy sweatshirt off over his head, taking a step closer to the conversation between the two other guys in the room. It was the tightness in his balls that made him ask. He was helpless to his ball sack’s needs. “How do you know if they’re, like, good?”

The escort expert looked at Tommy like he was an idiot. Weird flex to do in a locker room, to a guy who could make your head look like mashed potatoes, but OK. “Whaddya mean, good? Like, are they ‘good people’?” He snickered and curled his index fingers into air quotes. 

Tommy wanted to break the guy’s fingers off and shove them up the motherfucker’s ass, but that was maybe the testosterone speaking.

The thing was, Tommy knew this guy was making fun of him—he wasn’t an idiot—so he glowered and almost turned around to walk off. But the guy caught the change in Tommy’s expression and added, “No, I’m just fucking with you, Tommy. You mean, if they’re good at sex? They are, bro. Comes with the territory. It’s the job. Some are better than others, but if you find a good agency …” He shrugged and let Tommy’s mind fill in the rest.

Tommy relaxed and nodded gratefully. “A good agency. OK, thanks.” He had no clue how to find a good agency, what that would look like, how they would advertise, what they would charge, or what he’d say when he called. And how would he figure it all out in the next three hours, before he passed the fuck out with his blue balls?

“You could probably just hit on some girl at the bar, though, man. Somebody looks like you doesn’t have to pay for it,” the escort king of Chicago said. He was trying to be nice now, huh? “Or, like Doug said—go on Craigslist or whatever.”

Tommy glared at him dismissively and shook his head, shrugging. “Nah. I don’t do computers. And I heard what you were saying about complications. I got enough of those.” 

The two men nodded knowingly. What man didn’t know about the potential complications? Besides, Tommy had met lots of girls, girls all over the world, who wanted to save him or fix him, or make him want to be a better man. And fuck that. Take it, or leave it. In fact, take it AND leave it, which is what Tommy would prefer. No strings. No love.

Before the escort fan guy did something weird like offer Tommy the use of his email account or some shit, Tommy finished stripping out of his wet workout gear and walked to the showers with a beach towel wrapped around his waist. Hand to god, he had a halfie going, now that he was thinking about ordering a girl AND a pizza. Scratch that: Two pizzas. Fully loaded. Breadsticks. Actually, if he was fantasizing about shit that wouldn’t happen, especially while he was training, two pizzas, stuffed breadsticks, 120-ounces of soda pop, and then a really elaborate jerk-off session before he hit the hay. Bust out the almond oil. Make a real night of it.

It wasn’t entirely the end of the conversation, though, it turned out. By the time Tommy was out of the showers and returned to an empty locker room, there was a business card laying on top of his duffle bag. One side had a glossy photo of a beautiful woman on it, with a web address and phone number in gold type. On the other side, the escort whisperer had written: “Ask for Paige.”

 

“So, how’s this work?” Tommy asked into the payphone in the back of Reggie’s. Paige sounded nice. He’d already talked to her once, and then called back 20 minutes later, as she instructed. Was she the one he’d … be … “seeing”? He wondered what she looked like. He wondered if _she_ wondered what _he_ looked like. “Do you come here? To the bar? Or …”

Paige asked if he’d gone to the website to read the FAQ, whatever that was. If he’d picked out a girl. When he said no, that he didn’t have a computer or even know how to work the internet, really, Paige patiently explained the process, taking him through it. She wouldn’t normally send anyone out to a guy who couldn’t verify his identity, like Tommy couldn’t, but since he’d mentioned that he got the number from Richard, “a favored client in good standing,” and Rich vouched generously for him, he was fine. He was to pay cash up front, at the location of his choosing, leave the door unlocked, and the escort would check in with her driver—her bodyguard—at the 15- and 45-minute markers of the first hour. If Tommy went over 2 hours, it was no problem, but it was always up to the escort’s discretion and she could walk at any time if she felt unsafe.

“Yes, ma’am,” Tommy answered, nodding into the phone. Seemed straightforward. It wasn’t helping the growing urgency in his pants but it wasn’t hurting it either. It was less seedy than he imagined it would be, to be honest.

Paige paused and cleared her throat. After a moment, she asked: “Are you in the military, Mr. Riordan?”

He wasn’t expecting that. How’d she know that? Because he’d forgotten and said “ma’am,” probably. Women don’t like that, off the bases, or out of the South. Tommy never meant it as anything other than an honorific, a way of being polite and showing a woman respect, but he’d heard that it made them feel old so he should knock it off. Tommy looked around the back room of Reggie’s bar as if Paige had just announced it over the loudspeaker: WE HAVE A DESERTER IN THE BAR. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. 

He took a deep breath and replied, “I was. Not anymore.”

“It’s OK,” Paige said softly. “It’s good, actually. Thank you for your service. Now, here’s the other important part: What are you looking for tonight?” 

Tommy didn’t know what to say and was embarrassed to even try. Paige took pity on his stuttering attempt to ask for what he wanted and prompted him. Did he want to take photos? Did he want anything that might be considered “special” or “intense”? A certain ethnicity or look that he preferred? Age range? Body type? Did he want what was called “the girlfriend experience”? Would he prefer the escort to wear street clothes or dress up? Did he understand that there would be serious repercussions for any violence, nonconsensual acts, or any administration of recreational or prescription drugs?

No, he didn’t want a girlfriend … experience. Or to take photos. He didn’t even have a camera. Whatever age was fine, he figured. Someone nice? In good shape. Clean? He didn’t want anything weird or intense, no way. Maybe a massage, if that was allowed. Street clothes sounded OK—nothing too fancy as they’d just be in his crappy apartment. And yeah, he knew all about serious repercussions.

Ruby showed up at Tommy’s place an hour later. It was still pretty early, just around 9 o’clock, but Tommy already had had plenty of time to second- and third-guess his decision. Surely there was a better way to spend $300. Was that not enough money to get a good one? That’s all he could spend. What if she was ugly or gross? What if she was an addict and looked through his medicine cabinet? What if she robbed him? What if she was scared of him? What if, when they got naked, he couldn’t get it up?

Tommy didn’t know what to wear. He didn’t have anything that didn’t have an elastic waistband or a fleece lining, so he went with a clean pair of track pants and a zip-up hoody. As his nerves got to him, he fought the urge to reach for his bottle of Oxy, but he’d already had his one-a-day already, and he didn’t want this to be a waste of money. He drank a shot of whiskey, then two, to steady his nerves instead. Not enough to be drunk, not enough to give him whiskey dick—just enough to relax a little. When the knock sounded on his door, it occurred to him that he should have cleaned up the place a little bit. Moved the secondhand heavy bag out of the bedroom. Put away his clean laundry. Had something to offer her that wasn’t whiskey or beet juice served in an old OJ container.

But this wasn’t a date, he reminded himself. Or, it was, but it wasn’t a date _like that._

Ruby was sweet. He saw that right away. A Latina girl, young but not in a gross way, with long black hair and a big smile. She was wearing jeans and a loose black sweater that exposed a nice-enough-looking shoulder, a pretty neck and no small amount of smooth tan skin. He could see a tattoo peeking tantalizingly out from above the neckline of the sweater, just where it covered her other shoulder. He glanced at it before letting her into his place, looking behind her as if there was someone else coming in.

“Do I—is your driver…” Tommy asked, unsure. “Do I have to meet him or …?”

“What? Oh, no, he’s down in the lot. He doesn’t come up with me, it’s OK. I’ll text him in a bit. No big deal.” Ruby grinned at him and looked around cautiously before accepting the cash that Tommy held out to her. “You’ve really never done this before, have you?”

Tommy didn’t know what to say. “Uhhh …” he started to shut the door after her and then paused. “Oh—keep it unlocked, right?”

“Right,” Ruby agreed, unbothered. “So, you know Richie?” She tucked the money into her bag, set it down, and gestured questioningly at the crappy old couch that came with the place.

“Ah, not really. We go to the same gym,” Tommy explained, nodding at her to sit wherever she wanted. He sat, too, opposite her, in a dining chair. His one dining chair. Where he sat when he drank his beet juice.

“Oh, you work out?” Ruby chirped brightly. When Tommy looked at her funny—because hi, he was wearing workout clothes and his place smelled like a locker room and even though he wasn’t a giant, he was still easily two of her put together—she started laughing. Jokes. The girl had jokes. She quickly added, reaching out to swipe at his arm, “I’m kidding. I can tell you work out. You look real strong. And I love your ink.” She craned forward to peer at the bit of his upper chest that wasn’t covered by his hoodie. Her smile, big and goofy, put him at ease. She added, like an eager little kid, “Do you want to show me your tats? I’ll show you mine.”

“Uh, I don’t know …” Tommy groaned, smiling shyly at her joke about working out, and her apparent interest in seeing more of him. “See, I only just met you.” That’s as close as he got to flirting. Telling someone he didn’t know them. Irresistible, right? A real Casanova.

“Yeah? Okay, Tommy—we can take it slow if you want. Get to know each other?” Ruby offered, folding one leg under her on the couch. She was so cute that it broke Tommy’s heart a little. Broke his would-be boner a bit, too. How was he going to, you know, stick his dick in her if she was going to be so nice and so friendly and treat him sweet? What if he didn’t want to get to know her? Did that make him a monster?

“No, I mean—” Tommy’s smile turned into a grimace as he fought to feel and act normal in a very abnormal situation. Which was pretty much the story of his whole goddamned life. “Look, I don’t know how to do this, and you seem like a real nice girl, but—”

He sounded like he was about to break up with her, which made him feel even stupider. How could he fuck up a sure thing? Maybe he needed another drink. Risky, considering the penis situation, but maybe it would help.

Ruby bit her lip as she fought a smile. “Hey, it’s OK. I was nervous my first time too. It’s no big. Anything you want, OK? I’ll stop kiddin’ around with you. You want me to rub your back?”

Tommy exhaled a sigh of relief at what sounded like a genuine offer. That’s right, he’d asked for a massage. “God, would you? That would be so great.”

Ruby stood up and held her hand out to Tommy, waggling her fingers. “Of course! Are you kidding? I’d love to. But on the bed, OK? No offense, but this couch is really busted. Is the bedroom—” she looked at the three doors in his apartment: one was the john, one was a coat closet, and the third, which was open, was the ticket—the room with the bed. “Never mind, hun, I got you. Come on.”

He followed her, gladly. He didn’t know if he was supposed to be naked, or if she was supposed to be naked, or both of them—or neither? Or maybe just his top half? He looked at Ruby awkwardly and she must have read his mind. Either that, or he was the most obvious dipshit of all time. She unzipped his sweatshirt and helped him take it off. He could tell she was sizing up his body and he could tell she liked what she saw. She looked him over and gently ran her fingers across the crossed-out numbers on his chest. Manny. That was Manny—and oh god, would Manny have given him endless shit for this. _If you’re in heaven, looking down at me, brother, this might be a good time to take a powder._

Ten minutes into a pretty decent rubdown that had Tommy groaning like an old floorboard, Ruby’s phone chimed and she took a break, wiping her oiled-up hands on a washrag that she’d also pulled out of her bag. That was considerate, Tommy thought. Didn’t wipe it on his sheets or on his clean clothes.

“Just gotta text my driver real quick. Let him know I’m having fun,” she explained casually, taking her phone out of her back pocket and rapidly firing off a message. “Having fun” was such a weird way to put it but it made Tommy feel more a little more normal, a little more at ease. She couldn’t be having fun, could she? Like not really? Still tapping away at her screen, Ruby added, “And then I’m going to take my sweater off because it’s pissing me off, OK? And my jeans, so I don’t get oil all over them.”

Tommy’s dick twitched against the mattress. He was reminded, then, that Ruby was not a massage therapist. She was good at working at his muscles, but she wasn’t that kind of pro. She was the kind of pro who stripped down to her skivvies to rub him down with oil that she kept in her purse.

He propped himself up on his elbows and twisted around so he could look at her. Once her phone was put away, she put on a subtle but intentional show for him and pulled the sweater over her head, revealing a lacy black bra and a few tattoos: a bluebird almost on her shoulder, something in Latin, a smattering of stars. She was in good shape, but the kind of good shape that genetics gift certain people. She’d probably never done a crunch in her life, but Tommy could see that under a shallow layer of softness, she had a strong ab core. Her chest was petite but well-shaped, and when she caught his eyes lingering there, she fiddled with her bra strap.

“On? Or off?” she offered. Tommy, stunned, felt his mouth fall ajar a little at the headiness of it being his decision if she took her brassiere off—something she also observed. Nothing got past Ruby, did it? 

“I think off,” she decided, without waiting for a reply. With a deft and practiced couple of movements, there she was, topless, with her sweet, small tits bared, punctuated by sweet, small brown nipples.

“God, you’re so … pretty,” Tommy breathed out, because she was. And it had been a pretty long time since he’d seen a real live girl without her top on, and she’d been nowhere this good-looking.

“So are you,” Ruby said lightly, a small smile still playing across her broad mouth. “Sit up so I can see you better. If you want to, I mean.”

Tommy was OK with that. He pushed himself up until he was seated on his bed, bent-kneed instead of cross-legged so his stiffening cock wouldn’t be so obvious. He knew that was stupid, that Ruby was not going to get weird if he got a boner—that she was actually here because he _knew_ he would have a boner. She was here FOR the boner, really. But he felt shy, all of a sudden, vulnerable. 

He was about to say that this was a mistake, that he wouldn’t be able to go through with this, but then Ruby did that thing that you always see in movies, where she unbuttoned and unzipped her tight jeans and then turned around, her back to Tommy, so she could bend over and peel her jeans down while she gave him a very choice view of her perfectly round ass and her curvy little legs. She was wearing black lace panties that weren’t a g-string but showed a lot of cheek. If that was a thing with underwear style those days. Plus, her undies were slightly wedged into her ass, so as soon as her jeans were around her ankles, Ruby reached up with both hands and hooked her thumbs into the elastic to pull the fabric out of her butt. She snapped the elastic against the skin of her ass a little bit, playing around. She stayed in that position, too, looking back at him expectantly, with her head upside-down and her hair pooling on the floor near her discarded jeans.

“Oh, fuck,” Tommy said under his breath, forgetting to be polite. Oh yeah, his dick liked that move. It liked that quite a bit. He unconsciously moved his hand from where it was, cupped around the front of his leg, down to his dick. Yep. There it was, tenting out his track pants. “Stay like that for a second? Can I—?” He glanced down at his cock, an attempt to ask permission.

Ruby nodded, her head bobbing loosely above the floor of his bedroom. She was pretty flexible, it seemed. Comfortable being folded in half, which was … good? Right? For something? Tommy wanted to fold her in half, and then half again, and then he wanted to put Ruby in his pocket and carry her around with him for a few days, so he could take her out and look at her any time he wanted to feel good.

He rubbed at his cock while staring at her, as some kind of muscle memory started kicking in. Some part of his lizard brain that remembered how to respond to seeing a beautiful, mostly naked woman in the flesh. He was done with the massage part, that was for fucking sure. Fifteen minutes in—no, 18 now—and he already didn’t want to spend the rest of the two hours working the knots out of his traps. Tommy quickly shuffled himself around on the bed until he was able to stand so he could pull his track pants off and kick them toward the laundry pile.

When he was naked, buck-ass naked as a jaybird, Tommy somehow felt less vulnerable, less ridiculous. He knew he looked strong. He knew that girls liked how he looked, at least they used to, and he knew that he had nothing to worry about where it counted. No complaints in that department, ever. Yet, the way that Ruby looked at him was something else. She didn’t look scared or impressed or even weirded out by his muscles. She looked at him like she wanted him. Like she was hungry. She watched him, still inverted, as he watched her and slowly stroked himself.

“Can I get—” Ruby started squirming a bit.

“Not yet,” Tommy interrupted. “Just stay like that, please.” A few more strokes and he was panting and salivating. Fuck, she was so hot. His voice was raspy as he issued another instruction: “Your panties, too.”

Ruby didn’t hesitate and obeyed very willingly, shimmying her underpants down over the curve of her inner thighs and the soft skin of her calves. He could see her face as she did it, determined and a little flushed with pink, maybe from being inverted for that long.

“Open yourself up. Show me.”

She did as she was told and goddamn it if Tommy didn’t almost just blow his nut right there. A moan escaped him as Ruby’s long fingers pulled her ass cheeks apart just enough that Tommy could see all of her. The smooth, tan skin of her ass, a sparse bit of silky-looking pubic hair, a small glimpse of the glistening pink skin inside of her pussy. Fucking beautiful and perfect. The view made Tommy feel like an animal. He wanted to bury his face in that view. His cock, too. Hell, even if he could just freeze time and look at it for another hour and a half, that would be fine too.

Ruby glanced at her purse, taking her eyes off Tommy briefly, as she murmured, “Do you want me to get a—” 

“Uh-uh,” Tommy said firmly. Whatever she was going for, probably a rubber, that’s not where his head was. Taking a step toward her and dropping to his knees, cock still in one hand. He was probably less than 8 inches away from her, so close he could smell her—a very good, sweet, primal smell that he hadn’t realized he’d missed—but he figured he should ask before crossed any lines. “Is it—does it count as weird if I want to lick your pussy?”

“Fuck no, it doesn’t!” Ruby laughed. “Please do. I’d love that, baby.”

Tommy was so hard that a little drop of wetness was already beaded up at the end of his cock. He ran a thumb over it and used it to lubricate around the head. This was so much better than jacking it to a crispy Penthouse. Richard really _was_ a genius. Why didn’t Tommy do this all the time? Oh right, because it was expensive and he was supposed to be concentrating on training.

“What counts as weird?” he asked Ruby, almost as an aside. He was all of a sudden wildly curious about what cost extra with an escort. Where the lines were drawn in the sand. What if he wanted her to stay like that all night? What if he wanted to benchpress her? What if he wanted her to sit on his face while he jerked off? What if he wanted her to hit him in the face?

She tittered, “Oh you don’t even want to KNOW, believe me.”

_Probably right,_ he thought. He didn’t. So, he abandoned his cock to palm her hips with both hands, pulling her backward, against his open, waiting mouth. 

“Oh my god!” she faltered a bit, unsteady as he pushed his tongue up into her as far as it could go, licking and sucking her soft skin, the tip of his nose bumping against her tiny pristine asshole. She dropped her hands to the floor for balance and he pulled her back even further, taking a deep breath so he could properly devour her. Her knee buckled a little, after just a few licks, and Tommy pulled back immediately, steadying her rump with his hands. 

“You OK?” he asked, concerned. His lips were wet with his own spit and whatever he’d already pulled out of her with his tongue. He still wasn’t sure where the line was. “Is this too much?”

Ruby’s knee trembled a little and then locked. Her voice sounded shaky, too, like he’d caught her off-guard, as she answered, “No, it’s not too much! It’s good! Please keep going. Please, baby?”

He just wished she’d stop calling him baby. It was too … affectionate. Too familiar, something. This wasn’t personal, even if it was intimate. He wasn’t her baby and she wasn’t his sweetheart, even if he was rooting around in her pussy like a dog digging for a bone. If he was a real escort genius like Richard, Ruby would probably already be bouncing that sweet ass against his lower stomach. But he wasn’t a real escort genus. He was a first-timer. A noob. And this is how he wanted to spend his money.

He made Ruby come. Or, she acted like he did, anyway. Tommy couldn’t really tell, as he was at the time extremely occupied with the wet, messy act of rubbing his lips and tongue all up and down where the good lord split her. But he could hear her talking him through it in a sexy, low monologue. Off the cuff, her words were hot and spontaneous, and hearing her getting off on him was making him even harder. _Yeah, baby, you’re gonna make me come. Lick my tight little pussy like that. Ooh yeah, and now my asshole, baby. Yeah, I’m going to come all over you now. Yes, fuck me._

Then Ruby was yelping and moaning, twisting and squirming in his grasp, and one then both of her knees were buckling, and she was resting a good half of her body weight on his upturned face. She let out a deep, guttural moan and stopped trying to hold herself up. Tommy was more than strong enough to keep her hips at mouth height, so he did that as he laved his tongue all over her and left sloppy, sucking kisses on both of her cheeks.

In fact, Tommy was strong enough that he could—and did—carefully turn Ruby’s noodle of a body around and put her over his shoulder. He stood them both up from his kneeling position and she came around enough to realize what was happening.

“Oh my god, baby! What are you—”

Tommy grunted as he held her legs to his chest with one arm and wiped his mouth off with his other. He was carrying her over to the bed but she was still folded in half and probably lightheaded. 

Still, he had to interrupt her. Gently. “Ruby, hey,” he said firmly, while trying not to sound like too much of a dick. He hated to ruin the mood, but: “Can you not call me that?”

“Oh,” she replied right away, stone cold even in tone, even though she’d been giggling and panting just moments before. “Sure, no problem. I didn’t mean nothing by it, Tommy.”

Tommy felt bad. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings but he couldn’t let it slide, either. He turned her right-side up and controlled her gentle slide down his body until she was on her toes in front of him, still in his arms. Looking down at her flushed face, he saw that she was worried. In her eyes, he could see it. She didn’t know where all the lines were, either, probably.

“I know you didn’t,” he assured Ruby, who was searching his face carefully. Ugh, he wanted to kiss her. But that seemed like a line. Plus, he tasted like her pussy and some people weren’t into that. Probably cost extra. “It’s OK. Really OK. Just …”

Ruby relaxed and nodded. “It’s OK, I get it. I want you to be happy. When you’re happy, I’m happy.”

Tommy broke out into a smile and tangled his fingers into the ends of her long hair. “Actually,” he drawled down at her, “when YOU’RE happy … you’re happy all over my face.”

Ruby blinked quickly and let out a genuine—at least Tommy thought it was genuine—laugh. She sighed, “God, I haven’t come that hard in a long time. It was so fucking good. Your _mouth_. Holy cow.”

He couldn’t help but feel pleased with himself, and his face probably showed it. That’s right, Tommy Conlon—uh, Riordan—still had what it took to make a woman come. Save your applause for the end, folks. Be here for the next hour and fifteen minutes. He smiled at Ruby’s upturned face and said, dryly, “All right, all right, that’s enough of that.”

Unexpectedly, Ruby popped up on her toes and pressed her lips against his. He pulled away and looked at her, confused.

“Isn’t that against the rules?” he asked her. An honest question.

Ruby shook her head and licked her lips. “Nah, Tommy. That’s just in the movies. I’ll kiss you any time you want,” she murmured. “Mm, and you taste like me.”

Tommy regarded her for several moments. She was so tiny and sexy and sweet and she came for him and she wanted to kiss him. But he was paying her for all that. It wasn’t real. None of this was real. He couldn’t think too hard about how it wasn’t real—how all of it was bullshit, all of it was paid for because he got a fucking hard-on like a loser—or he’d get upset.

“I don’t want a girlfriend experience, or whatever it’s called,” he warned her. 

Ruby swallowed and glanced from his mouth to his eyes, and back again, a couple of times. “You’re not getting one,” she shot back, saltier now. “You’d know it, if you were. I just wanted to kiss you, OK? And if you don’t like—”

Tommy picked her up by the waist and squeezed her closer to him, as he closed his eyes and kissed her firmly on the mouth. When she raised her arms up to loop them around his neck, it was clear she wasn’t mad about what he’d said. He opened his mouth and Ruby opened hers and everything was wet and warm between them again. 

They somehow lowered themselves into a horizontal position on the bed without breaking the kiss, with Tommy braced against one elbow on the mattress as he came to rest between her legs. He was so much bigger than her that his dick wasn’t even close to being in the zone, it was once again grinding lazily against the wrinkled sheets on his bed. But still. He needed to be inside her soon.

“Do you want me to suck you off?” Ruby asked, direct and businesslike, as she finally broke the kiss. “I can return the favor if you want?”

“Does that cost extra?” 

Ruby shook her head. “Nope.”

Tommy considered it. It would be nice but he would come too fast, he was sure of it. That’s how long it had been. “Mmm, maybe later, OK?”

Trying again, Ruby suggested, “I could lick your ass while you jerk off?”

Tommy couldn’t believe the mouth on her and he pulled back slightly in surprise consternation. “What, really? You’d do that? Does that cost extra?”

Ruby’s lips parted and her smile revealed a full row of perfect white teeth. “Yeah,” she winked, “That costs extra.”

Tommy fought the urge to smile back at her. She was funny, too. Maybe he _should_ have paid for the “girlfriend experience.” Maybe she’d agree to just _be_ his girlfriend. Maybe, in the end, all he needed was the love of a good woman to turn around his shitty, fucked-up life. That old chestnut. Maybe he’d fill her up with his drunk mick babies and she’d be Ruby Riordan Whatever her maternal last name was. Pilar would probably even like her.

_Shut the fuck up, Tom._

“Good as that sounds, I think I just want to fuck you,” Tommy whispered quietly. He was serious now. The jokes were all well and good but the clock was ticking and his dick wasn’t going to fuck itself. Well, not like it usually did, anyway.

“Yeah? You want to fuck me?” It was a challenge and she presented it as such.

Tommy nodded soberly back at her, brushing a stray bit of her hair out of her eyes. “Yeah.”

“Rubber or bareback?”

Ah, a real dilemma, finally. Tommy stopped stroking her soft hair and looked at her evenly. “Bareback is extra?” 

Ruby nodded slowly, no longer joking around. She actually looked a little sad. Of course it was extra. Why shouldn’t it be? It was a risk. Tommy briefly entertained it and then thought better of it. “I’ll use a rubber.”

“Tommy,” Ruby sighed. “You—I could give you a first-timers discount. If you want that. It’s OK.”

“Nah, maybe next time,” he said. It just slipped out. _Next time._  Like that would ever happen.

Ruby shrugged off the dismissal of her offer. Even more quietly, she asked, almost sounding obliged: “Do you want to fuck me hard or … do it sweet?”

Tommy had had just about enough of the negotiation but it seemed fair enough. It was her job. She had more to lose than he did.

“Do you always ask guys that?” Tommy asked her, hating himself as he heard the words come out of his mouth. He didn’t want to know. Was it too late to ask her not to answer? It was.

Ruby admitted that she didn’t. She squeezed his biceps and ran her hands over the flexed muscles of his shoulders and up his neck. “It’s just … you’re a big, strong guy. You seem like you’re a real teddy bear but I don’t want you to get too rough and hurt me.”

Tommy understood completely. It made sense. “I won’t hurt you, Ruby. But I’m not a teddy bear.”

She nodded and then craned up to kiss him softly. Her lips next his mouth, she added in a whisper, “Let me text Daryl to let him know I’m good. I’m gonna grab a rubber for you, too, b—I mean Tommy. Sorry.”

He wished it didn’t bother him that she called him that, he thought, as he moved aside so she could get out from under him, flipping over so he was on his back. He watched her and ran his hand over the head of his cock a few times. He was almost painfully hard still, even with all that negotiation. Go, go, beet powder.

There weren’t any cool escort tricks that Ruby employed to put the condom on him. She just put it on normal, rolling it down over his shaft in a graceful movement, and stroked it a bit with it on to get him used to it. 

“How do you want me? On top?” Ruby lifted her eyebrows as she offered it somewhat hopefully. 

She seemed to be into that idea so Tommy gamely agreed. She lowered onto his cock with a heavy sigh, rocking back and forth gently on him. “Mmm,” she breathed, her voice low and throaty again, “you feel so good inside of me.” 

“Good,” Tommy grunted in reply. His hands gripped her ass tightly as he helped her move against him, dragging her up and back, up and back. “You feel good, too.” 

Not exactly poetry, but what can you expect from a man who deserted his unit, fled the desert, crossed halfway back around the world, fought in a cage, and waited way too long for a complications-free fuck. So long that he forgot how to be a normal person and eventually wound up hiring an escort. A beautiful and sweet one, yeah, but she was still on the clock and that officially made him no better than that dickhead Richie. Richard. Whatever.

Ruby was looking down at him with half-lidded eyes, like she was feeling this, like she was real into him, hungry for him. The longer she looked, the more uncomfortable Tommy started to feel. She was talking, too, a long string of dirty talk that occasionally lapsed into Spanish and got even dirtier. He didn’t want her to know he understood or spoke Spanish. That was how he talked to Pilar—to Manny’s kids, for fuck’s sake. That wasn’t for … this.

He bodily picked Ruby up by the ass cheeks and maneuvered her until they’d switched places and she was lying down. He was between her legs again, but this time, his dick was in alignment with her pussy. It slid into her like a perfect dovetail. He moved into her with gentle thrusts, closing his eyes in concentration. A few times, she moved to catch his lips with hers, urging him into a deep kiss. Tommy relaxed into it after a bit, but tensed up again when he opened his eyes. 

Ruby was looking at him, full-on. Gazing, kinda. That was it. She wasn’t staring at him or nothing. But it felt weird, somehow. He felt exposed. What if he looked weird when he was fucking? Or stupid. What if she, like, _knew_ his bullshit? Knew what he’d done. That he was lying about who he was. That he was orphaned by his mother’s cancer, and the estranged son of Paddy, forgotten brother of Brendan. That he wasn’t Tommy Riordan, that he was Tommy Conlon. 

He pulled back from her, looked her parted lips, her nice teeth, and her pink tongue just beyond. _Her name probably wasn’t Ruby, either,_ he thought. They were both liars.

Pausing just before the tip of his dick would be almost out of her, Tommy heard himself say, “Don’t look at me, OK? It’s OK if you talk, but, like … don’t look at me.”

Ruby blinked at him again, not understanding. “What do you mean?” She went stiff, like she’d done something wrong and he was going to be mad, so he lowered his face down and kissed her neck tenderly. It was OK. He was still a nice boy … who had rented her body for an hour or two. As if he were someone who did shit like that.

Tommy pushed into her again, a harder this time, with a little more urgency. He wasn’t going to last, so he didn’t really care about taking his sweet time. He wouldn’t need that second hour, for damn sure. She felt good under him: warm, wet, willing. Soft noises and sighs at every push into her, louder ones as he thrust a little harder, a little deeper. He reluctantly stopped kissing Ruby’s neck and braced his elbow on the pillow next to her head, so he could get a more leverage, drive into her harder. When he rose up, even that small bit, he saw that she’d gone back to looking at him. Ruby’s eyes were reading his face with her brow furrowed, like she was trying to figure him out, even as she lightly raked her fingernails across the muscles of his shoulders.

“Ruby,” he cautioned her again, more seriously this time. “Don’t fucking look at me, OK?”

“Yeah, OK,” she mumbled into his cheek, sounding disappointed and more than a little cautious. On guard. “I won’t look, Tommy.” 

He’d gone and been a dick to her and she wasn’t going to like him anymore, was she? Tommy’d fucked that up, too. _Good job fuckin’ up a wet dream, idiot._

With a sigh, Ruby turned her face away and took what Tommy was giving her. Every inch of it. The more tightly she squeezed her eyes shut, the harder he fucked her. Eventually, he was really going at it, getting his money's worth and grunting like an animal, his belly smacking against hers, and her small tits bouncing up and down across her breastbone. Tommy was straining, racing toward his own finish, getting lost in the act, the physicality—not unlike the red-rage blackouts he’d get in the cage sometimes.

Except getting lost like this didn’t hurt. It felt good. 

After he came, with a soft, choked sob, Tommy buried his face into the hollow between Ruby’s neck and collarbone, and collapsed, shaking, on top of her. He was breathing hard, sweating. She wasn’t even winded, but he could feel her heart beating fast, like a hummingbird’s heart, inside her chest. 

She held Tommy’s head and combed her nails through his hair, soothing him as he caught his breath and trembled. She was a good girl and he was … a dick. A liar. _A fucking animal_.

“It’s OK, Tommy,” Ruby murmured sweetly into his ear. “S’OK, _miel_. _Esta bien_.”

For a second there, in his sensitive state, Tommy thought Ruby almost sounded like Pilar. The thought of Manny’s wife—without Manny—turned his stomach. Suddenly, Tommy just wanted Ruby to leave so he could curl up in a ball on his bed and suffer alone.


	2. Round Two

Tommy didn’t tell Ruby to leave. He wanted to, right after he'd finished, but then, once he’d caught his breath and pulled out—careful to keep the condom on as he withdrew—he didn’t know what to say. 

_You’re not paying an escort to stay,_ _you’re paying them to leave._ That was what those dicks at the gym said.

He kind of wanted to be alone, that was true—he just didn’t want to be a dick about it. It wasn’t likely that Ruby would care, though. She’d gently rubbed his shoulder, soothing him, even as he pulled the rubber off his cock and tied the open end in a neat knot. But, still, he didn’t want her to be upset. It was fucking embarrassing—part of him wanted her to still be having fun, like she said she was having fun when she texted Daryl or whoever it was that was looking out for her.

The problem was—Tommy wasn’t any fun. Hadn’t been since he was a kid, and probably not even then.

They were both quiet while Tommy sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed his face with his hand, thinking. Eventually, Ruby stirred a little and started to move her way around him. Was she leaving? Just, like, right after he finished? Is that how this shit was supposed to go?

“That’s it, then?” Tommy blurted out helplessly, dropping his hand. “You out?”

Ruby hummed her uncertainty but replied with a smile. “I can be? Was just going to use your potty real quick—but I can get out of here, if you want to crash out or whatever.”

Oh, right. The bathroom. Clean herself up a little—a wholly normal thing to do after sex. Tommy nodded dumbly and gestured with an open palm that she should be his guest and use the facilities. But, as for him, he didn’t know what he was supposed to do now.

Ruby stood next to him and reached out tentatively to cup her fingers around the back of his head, under his ear. “You want me to go, Tommy?”

Instead of nodding, Tommy pressed his head back harder into her palm, closing his eyes. It felt good to just be touched softly. The last time he’d been touched with any sort of sweetness was way back in El Paso, when he’d hugged Manny’s kids goodbye and Pilar had cried on his shoulder. That was over a month ago. Since then, the only touch he got came via hard hits or no-nonsense rubdowns from an elderly coach named Larry.

“You know … you have another hour, Tommy?” Ruby advised lightly. “With me."

She didn’t  _ have _ to say that. She could have just bailed. That would also be, Tommy thought, a normal thing to do.

Tommy kept his mouth and eyes shut, stretching his traps as he rolled his head on his neck. Ruby took away her hand and continued, her tone even and sweet, “You paid for two hours: $300. Usually I just do the one-hour appointment. For $150.” She was confiding in him, now, he could tell. Her voice sounded different.

Her honesty caught Tommy by surprise. Wait. He could have just spent $150 bucks for all that? He  _ knew _ he shouldn’t have said something stupid like “what will $300 get me?” to Paige on the phone. What an idiot. He opened his eyes and turned his face to look up at her. She was smiling at him, all friendly, with that wide, pretty mouth and those pretty teeth. She didn’t seem weirded out or upset by what had just happened between them. That he’d been inside of her. She didn’t seem at all bothered by the fact that he’d told her to quit looking at him, right before he fucked the hell out of her like she was a … you know. He guessed she’d probably seen and had worse.

“Why would you tell me something like that?” he asked quietly, curious but a little sad, too. He couldn’t keep it out of his voice. He always felt shaky and nervous after he came, even by himself.

“Because you’re new. I want you to feel good about this, Tommy,” Ruby answered matter-of-factly. “I want you to get what you want. Maybe you’ll call me again.”

She really was nice. Were all escorts like that? Or is it because he, like a big dummy, asked for “someone nice”? Tommy felt out of his depth.

“If you want me to go, I’ll take off, but I really do have to pee, like … now,” Ruby said, bouncing on her toes a bit, just to assure him that she was serious.

Tommy couldn’t fight a smirk and waved a hand toward the john. “Go on, then. It’s right there. All yours." 

Ruby didn’t waste any time hustling to the restroom, leaving Tommy to sit with his thoughts. He felt pretty good, all told. And he’d already paid. So, why not.

He could hear her, going, with the door open. He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard a girl piss before. Was that part of the girlfriend experience, too? On the other hand, it was good that she didn’t shut the door, so he didn’t have to worry that she’d get into the medicine cabinet behind the shitty sink mirror, and he wouldn’t catch her stealing any Oxy. He quickly imagined all that going down, with a surge of shame for even thinking it, for being so paranoid, and forced it out of his head.

“Hey, Ruby?”

He could hear her finishing up. She called out, “Yeah? Almost done.”

Tommy laid back on his bed and threw an arm over his eyes. “Take your time.”

Ruby was back in his room in a few seconds after. He lifted his arm and head to look at her. She was picking up her panties and bra, shaking them out, totally unashamed of being bare-assed in front of him. She looked real good, too—not a hair out of place, not all sweaty. Not like him. 

Ruby tucked her bra under an arm and was about to step into her undies before Tommy spoke up.

“I mean, if you don’t got anywhere to go right now …” he started, trailing off as she lifted her head to make eye contact with him. “Maybe you could stay a little longer?”

Ruby grinned and straightened to standing. “Yeah?” She raised her eyebrow. “You want me to hang out for a bit?”

Tommy replied with a brief nod.

“Want me to get dressed?”

With a quick look at her, head to toe, he answered with an even more brief shake of his head. She looked happy at his decision, but he couldn’t imagine why. She could have just walked out with the 300 bucks for under an hour of work.

Tossing her undies onto her bag at the foot of his bed, Ruby came back over to where he was seated and put a hand on his shoulder. “You tired? I could rub your back some more? Maybe you’d fall asleep?”

Tommy reached out and ran a hand up her flank, rubbing a thumb over the star tattoo she had on her hip as he nodded. “Yeah … that sounds good. Or maybe just scratch it?”

She giggled. “Awww! Cutie! Yeah. I can do that.”

He looked up at her, cocking his head, feeling the soft warmth of her skin under his palms. No one in his life had called him “cutie.” He frowned at her, fighting a smile. “‘Cutie’? You sure this isn't the girlfriend experience?”

Ruby shrugged, laughing with a full display of those pearly whites. “Pfft! Shut up! OK. Getting dangerously close to it, to be honest—but like I said: I want you to be happy and feel good, Tommy. And I like touchin’ you, so …”

The truth, then. She wanted something that wouldn’t ever happen—he’d never be happy. He wasn’t built for it. But he could maybe feel good for a little longer. He didn’t normally like being touched by strangers, either, but she did it right. Not firm scratches in targeted spots, just lazy, light scratches all over his back. Taking her time. He felt himself relax again. Zoned out. Wasn’t sleepy but wasn’t real awake, either. 

She was quiet for a long time while she scratched him with one hand, the other hand on his arm, holding it for balance as she twisted from her seat on the bed to reach the outer perimeters of his back.

“You a boxer or something?” she asked idly, making conversation. He was practically drooling, he was so languid. His eyelids were even getting heavy. This was a good way to spend his second hour.

That’s right—she knew that Richard fuckwit who’d given him the escort agency card at the gym. A thought shot through his head: Had she fucked him, too? What did  _ he _ order? Did  _ he  _ get the girlfriend experience or did he ask for weird, freaky shit? That annoying prick probably just wanted anal. On him.

Wait. Why the fuck was he thinking about that jackass? He was supposed to be relaxing.

“Something like that,” he mumbled, his face smooshed into his pillow. He didn’t really enjoy explaining what he was to anybody—like, ever. Not even when he was a kid. But especially not after he deserted his unit. Especially not after Manny.

“You fight,” Ruby confirmed. 

“Mm-hm.”

“You got a job?” 

He twitched, not wanting to lose the buzzy feel of the moment. He tried to hold onto it, but it was gone in a flash. “Yeah,” he answered flatly, “I got a job.”

“Doing what?” Ruby asked. 

“Fighting. Like you said.” He lifted his head and opened the eye closest to Ruby to peer at her. “Look, do you mind if we don’t talk about work? I was in a real good spot just then.”

Ruby looked apologetic and nodded. “I just … I was just wondering if you’d ever work for an agency, that was all,” she blurted out. Tommy shut his eyes and lowered his head back down with a sigh. Still talking about work. “It’s just that you’re a scary-looking guy and, like, Daryl ain’t shit—not really. You could probably knock his head off with one punch. He doesn’t hardly even have to work, though. It’s easy money, and you’d only have to get physical with someone if things got real weird, which is hardly never.”

“Ruby …” Tommy groaned, annoyed. “Come on.”

“What? I’m just saying! You’d be good at it.”

Tommy knew he’d be good at it. Sure, he would. He could drive, he could fight, he didn’t talk much, and he preferred to get paid under the table. But. But what the fuck.

“What—driving you around?” He grudgingly pushed himself onto his elbows and turned his head to look at her. When their eyes made full contact, it was clear that she knew she’d said something wrong.

Ruby looked down at him, her smile faltering as she stammered, “Well, yeah? I mean—maybe not  _ me _ . But—”

Tommy interrupted her, a flash of anger coming out of nowhere. “No? Not you? Why not you? Don’t want me to wait in the car while you get reamed? You want me to wait for some other girl while SHE gets fucked by some asshole in a motel room?” He doubled down on it, unable to hold back a glare. “Some asshole just like me—but maybe with more money?” 

Ruby withdrew her hands and put them in her lap, looking down at them. “I’m sorry.”

Tommy wasn’t done, though. He snarled, “Do you ask all your ‘clients’ if they want a job being a hooker bodyguard—or just me?”

He didn’t mean to say it like that. It was true, at least how he saw it, and he was angry about it, but it was too mean. Too cruel. That word, too:  _ hooker _ . It made her flinch, harden, and he saw it happen. His whole uncontrolled reaction betrayed his true feelings about what they’d just done—the business transaction, the lame attempt at intimacy, the quick orgasm, the seediness of it all. It also betrayed that he had some kind of feeling about her that went beyond the transaction. Either way, he looked like a jerk. 

“Um, I’m gonna go,” Ruby said, pursing her lips as she looked over at him carefully. She added, as an afterthought, “Hey, I’m sorry, Tommy.”

She stood up from the bed and Tommy followed suit by sitting up, as well. He was still angry but he could see that Ruby was scared. Of him. It was his fault. He’d gone too hard. She was just trying to be helpful in her own way, and he’d gone and opened up a can of bile on her.

Tommy couldn’t look her in the eye after that realization, even when she’d apologized. He stared silently at her for a moment, as she gathered up her things and pulled on her panties, his mind racing with all the things he might say to apologize, too. He was actually sorry. And about way more than what he’d said to her. But the words wouldn’t come. 

I’m a jerk, he should have said. I didn’t mean it. Don’t leave.

But he didn’t say it. He sat on the bed and watched Ruby put her clothes on in the other room, grab her bag, and head out of his door. It quietly clicked closed behind her and the noise prompted Tommy to spring out of bed. It wasn’t right, he knew it. He’d catch her before she got down the hall, and say he was sorry. Grabbing a pair of shorts and rushing toward the door, he glanced down at the table and saw the money she’d left on the table: a handful of twenties and a ten. He stopped moving and didn’t start back up as he made sense of it in his head.

That was his second hour. Damn. What kind of escort gives refunds?   
  


Days later. Tommy, sloppily unraveling the wrap on his left hand, was wondering if it was more sore than the other because he was landing with his left too much, or if he’d fucked it up without knowing it. Maybe in Iraq. All parts of his body were aching at various times, but this left hand thing … this was new.

“So?” 

He looked up at the sound of a voice in what he thought was an empty locker room, confused until he saw who was asking. Richard. Richie. Whatever. That dickhead.

“So … what?” Tommy replied, flinching lightly as he clenched and flexed his bare fingers. He looked the guy straight in the eye, without expression.

“So … did you call …” He leaned in toward Tommy and lowered his voice. “Did you call …  _ the agency _ ?” 

Tommy stared back at him. Oh NOW the guy was the picture of discretion, using a bitchy little whisper. Now that it was just him and Tommy in a room, he was keeping it on the DL. Just two bros … working out in the same room, who use escorts and talk about it at the gym. Nothing to see here. 

“What do you care if I called?”

“You  _ did _ ,” Richard concluded, smug. He looked real excited about it and Tommy hated that now he had something in common with this dickhead. Grinning, he added, “I can tell. I knew you’d call. Who’d you get?”

“None of your fucking business, man,” Tommy said, starting on the wrap of his other hand. He was sweaty enough, tired enough, that the tape scissors slipped out of his other hand and clattered to the floor. Richard was suddenly close enough to reach down and pick up the scissors for him. 

As he handed them over, he said, “Come on. I’m just curious. Was it Brooke?”

Tommy shook his head, waving the guy away after he’d accepted the scissors. “Nah, man, it wasn’t Brooke,” he said, realizing too late that he was basically admitting to that, yeah, he’d hired an escort—although it wasn’t Brooke.

“Was it Kyley?”

“Dude,” Tommy said firmly. “What the fuck do you care who I got? Do you get a cut or something?”

Richard snorted. “What? I fuckin’ wish I did. No, man. I’m just curious. Just … being friendly or whatever.”

Tommy rolled his eyes and finished unwrapping his hand, stooping over to gather up the discarded gauze and tape that was pooled at his feet like intestines. Richard waited and then took a step back. Good.

“Well,” Richard sighed, finally getting the hint that maybe Tommy didn’t want to compare notes. “At least tell me if you’d rec—”

“Fuck off, man,” Tommy said flatly. No teeth in it, though. It wasn’t a threat. He just wanted the guy to shut up. Richard took another step back. He wasn’t a fighter who’d ever been in a ring or a cage, or probably even a real fight. Just some dude who came to the gym to take a floor class in cardio kickboxing or Tai Bo or yoga boxing … or whatever the fuck new yuppie shit the gym offered in an attempt to lure in new clientele.

He wouldn’t last three seconds. Not in a real fight. Tommy knew it. Richard knew it too. He shrugged and backed away from Tommy, who glared him out of the aisle of lockers.

Good boy, Rich. Keep on walking.   
  


Tommy couldn’t help but admit that maybe Richard was onto something, though. With the escorts. With the lack of complications. Even though the second hour didn’t work out so great, the first hour with Ruby had definitely been a release, and one that Tommy sorely needed. And maybe it was just a coincidence, but that next weekend, he went onto winning his next qualifier fight for an upcoming local tournament. AND, two nights later, he made an easy grand for a shutout at a low-stakes cage fight event at a popup venue near Midway. Tommy was back on his game‚and he wasn’t sure if it was all due to the beet juice, or his careful rationing of pills … or for getting his rocks off with Ruby. Part of him wondered if getting laid regularly would help his fighting even more, or if there was some kind of a ratio to work out. It had been a long time, that’s all—and he not only was fighting better, he was feeling better. Sleeping a little easier.

Maybe he got a little cocky, because things were going well. Or, if not well, then they were at least going better. He agreed, uncharacteristically, to go out to get a couple of drinks with a few of the guys from the gym. Not Richard—good guys: an older man, retired from training, and a young guy that Tommy sparred with on occasion. The old man said they knew a place with strong drinks and good Chinese food, and—as Tommy had just taken two darvocets on account of a new searing pain in his rotator cuff—strong drinks and Chinese food sounded just about perfect.

And it was. Perfect. General Tso couldn’t have done better himself, whoever he was. He had good chicken. And the drinks were BOGO, so the waitress would bring them two at a time, which was clutch. Tommy could barely even feel the drinks through the darvocets. They acted in tandem inside his body, booze and pills, pills and booze, until he was feeling no pain. 

At the bar, after the food was taken away, the older guy, John, was telling the younger guy about his kid trying to get into the junior olympics. Pole vaulting.

“I did that,” Tommy heard himself say. It wasn’t really his thing to brag about his past. Or even talk about it. But he’d said it and they’d heard it.

“Yeah? Pole vaulting?” John asked, surprised. Tommy snorted and shook his head. John tapped his temple like he hadn’t put much thought into that. “Oh, ha, right. For what—wrestling, then?”

Tommy nodded, looking back up at the TV and lifting his drink to his lips. He’d won six titles in the Junior Olympics, led by his pops. Worked his ass off when he should have been out having fun. Brendan was having fun. He wrestled, too, but Paddy didn’t ride him as hard as he rode Tommy. His older brother had time for girls and sneaking out to smoke joints with his friends. He had time for friends, in general. Tommy, on the other hand, woke up at 0430 to run six miles wearing trash bags under his sweats so he could cut weight. He did 200 sit-ups by noon and another 200 before supper, where he’d fall asleep in the middle of eating his mom’s scalloped potatoes. Then, if he was smart about it, he’d head to bed at 8 o’clock in the hopes that he could skip the Paddy Conlon Angry Hour. 

“Did you medal?” Chris, the younger kid, asked. Tommy was sorry he’d said anything. Should have kept his war stories to himself.

“Uh, yeah,” he answered, pushing away from the bar to use the facilities. Chris looked at him eagerly, wanting more information. “Medaled the same year I won state,” Tommy finished. “I’ll be back.”

He could hear them talking about it as he walked off—Chris laughing in surprise, asking John, “Ha! What state? Did you know that, J?”

Tommy was slouching toward the toilets, imagining the two guys searching frantically on their tippity-tappity phones for “Tom Riordan, state champ, wrestling” only to find nothing and drop it, thinking he was a liar, when he saw Ruby.

She was sitting with her back against the bar, talking to a guy who was facing away from Tommy, and he recognized her by her smile right away. Too late to avoid it, they made eye contact and her smile got even bigger as she recognized him. He faltered imperceptibly in his gait, but kept moving, trying to ignore her. 

In the restroom, he decided it was best to pretend like it had never happened—none of it: not their date, not even recognizing her. What would he say? She was probably with another customer. The thought made his stomach flip. He washed his hands while he glared at himself in the mirror.  _ Fucking scumbag _ .

“Hey Tommy,” Ruby said cheerily, before he’d taken even two steps out of the men’s room. She was waiting in the hall, arms crossed in front of her chest. She looked good—black high-heeled boots, wearing a bright red dress that was form fitting and showed off her good shoulders and her cute tattoos. Her hair was down and loose and … she looked real nice. The kind of nice that Tommy couldn’t have ignored even if she wasn’t standing right in front of him, blocking his path.

Tommy looked over her shoulder. The guy she was sitting with wasn’t there anymore. He replied with a curt, “Hey.”

Turning to see what he was looking at, she explained, “Oh, he went out for a smoke. I wanted to say hi to you!”

Nodding, Tommy said, “Yeah, hi.” With a thoughtful frown, he added, “Are you—is he a customer?”

Ruby corrected him, “Client. No. That’s Rob. He’s my boyfriend.”

Taken by surprise, Tommy blurted, “Your boyfriend?”

She nodded. All the more reason he should make himself scarce, then. He could see John and Chris as the bar, laughing about something on the television. If he could make it back to them before the dude, Rob, came back in from outside, maybe he could get away with never seeing the guy’s face. He didn’t want to know who Ruby went home to after she left Tommy’s place that one time, weeks ago.

“Okay, well, I gotta get back to my friends,” he said, shrugging noncommittally. He moved to get around her as he mumbled, “Nice to see you.”

“Tommy, wait,” Ruby said softly, reaching out to hold his arm. “I’m sorry I was saying all that stuff to you. It was out of line and I was being stupid. I feel bad about it.”

He wrinkled his nose and shook his head, looking down at her hand. “Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.” 

“Accept my apology?” She squeezed his arm and smiled up at him, and all of a sudden, all he could think about was her sitting on his face.

“Yeah, sure,” he sighed, feeling increasingly uncomfortable. What if Rob rolled up and wanted to know what was going on? What if Tommy ruined everything for her, even without trying? “It’s no problem.”

He pulled away from Ruby’s grip and patted her genially on the shoulder, like he was some benevolent coach telling her she did fine, just fine, even if she didn’t win. She looked sad as he went to navigate around her and get back to the guys at the bar. He caught it out of the corner of his eye: sad. Beautiful and sweet, but sad.   
  


Two hours later—two hours of Tommy’s very careful, very intentional avoidance of looking anywhere other than at John, Chris, the bartender, or the TV—it was time to go. Chris was looking a little unsteady on his feet, the featherweight, and John was tired and wanted to get back home to his wife. Tommy was still tearing the wrapper off his fortune cookie when the three of them got outside. 

The air smelled like Chinese food, greasy somehow, even though it was cold out. Tommy held his fortune cookie up by means of farewell to Chris and John, who were sharing a taxi back to the Jefferson Park. Tommy could hoof it pretty easily back to his place from the restaurant, and there was no reason why he shouldn’t save a couple of bucks.

With his watch cap pulled down low over his ears and the sound of his chewing drowning everything else out, sound was muffled a bit, but Tommy could still hear the faint sounds of a woman crying. Stopping mid-chew, Tommy looked around and saw that Ruby herself was the source of the sound. She was leaning against a bike rack, looking at the glowing screen of her phone. She had her coat on, at least, but she didn’t look warm, or like she particularly gave a shit.

“Fuck,” Tommy muttered under his breath. He looked around briefly, not wanting to check on her if boyfriend Rob might step out of the shadows, or emerge from a parked car in the lot at any moment. 

The movement of his head caught Ruby’s attention and she glanced up. When she saw it was Tommy, she rolled her eyes and shook her head in disbelief. She didn’t want to be seen crying, it seemed, any more than Tommy wanted to be the one to see her crying.

Taking a couple steps toward her, Tommy called softly, still paranoid that her boyfriend was going to swoop down from the sky like Batman, “You OK?”

Ruby nodded quickly, tearfully, and gave him a quick flash of a wan smile. “Yeah, I’m OK.”

“OK,” Tommy nodded, swallowing the last bit of his cookie. “You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks.”

Tommy turned to go, jerking his hood of his coat up over his hat as he walked, when she called out after him, “What did it say?”

“Huh?”

“What did your fortune say?”

Tommy hadn’t looked. He’d just stuffed it in his pocket with the wrapper. He turned back to Ruby as he fished it out. When he started to read it outloud, she started to walk closer to him. “Uh, it says, uh ... ‘Hard work pays off in the future … laziness pays off now.’” 

He didn’t  _ not _ get it but he couldn’t really say he loved it. Sometimes hard work didn’t ever pay off. Least, as far as he knew.

“In bed,” Ruby offered, still moving toward him. She dabbed the tip of her finger at the corner of her eye, probably trying to dry her tears without fucking up her makeup. 

“What? What do you—” That made even less sense. In bed? What was that supposed to mean? 

“Laziness pays off now …  _ in bed _ .” Ruby laughed quietly. “You know? People say ‘in bed’ at the end of their fortune?”

“Oh,” Tommy nodded. He didn’t know people did that. Said that. Whatever. What did it even mean? Curious, though, he asked, “What’d yours say?”

Ruby looked like she was going to start crying again. She shook it off but her voice cracked as she replied, “Ugh, it was ‘You can make your own happiness.’” That set her off again, and a few fat tears rolled down her cheeks.

“In bed?” Tommy suggested.

Ruby nodded, sniffling even as she let out a small, quiet laugh. After a few shaky breaths, she agreed, “Yeah, in bed.”

He didn’t know what to say. Well, he did have an idea, but he didn’t want to make a joke about her being happy in bed, or being happy all over his face, without knowing what was up.

“So, what’s going on, Ruby?” He shoved his hands in his pockets. She was close enough to touch and he didn’t trust himself. Glancing around again, he asked, “Where’s your boyfriend? Rob, or whatever.”

She rolled her eyes up to the sky, trying not to cry. “He took off.”

“He left you here? By yourself?” Tommy snapped protectively. What kind of a guy did that? The kind of guy who didn’t know his girlfriend was an escort, Tommy guessed.

“Yeah, he went back home. He took me out to break up with me, I guess, so once that was done …”

Tommy was flummoxed. “He broke up with you? Why?”

Ruby shrugged. “I don’t know. He said he just wasn’t feeling it.”

“Did he find out that you’re a—that you were—” The thought occurred to Tommy that maybe this was somehow his fault too. That maybe Rob had seen them talking, asked her how they knew each other.

“What, Tommy? That I’m an escort?” Ruby snorted dismissively. “No, he knew already.”

“He knew?” Tommy couldn’t help but be incredulous. The guy knew his girlfriend was sleeping with other guys for money?

“Yeah?”

“And he didn’t care?”

“No, it’s just a job. He’s never been worried all about that. I mean, he sells weed but you don’t see me getting all preachy about it.”

Tommy couldn’t wrap his head around it. “He didn’t—what, did he get you into escorting or something?”

Ruby looked a little annoyed. “Tommy, no. It wasn’t like that.” She explained, “We’ve been hanging out for like a year but he’s just sick of me, I guess.” Her defenses fell as quickly as they’d come up and she teared up again.

Tommy felt his hackles rise. He had a feeling about this kind of stuff, usually, and something about this stunk. “Ruby, did he mess with you? Hurt you?” 

He hadn’t gone out looking for trouble, but if Rob had even laid one finger on her, or just been shitty to her, Tommy was prepared to take that piece of shit apart.

“God, no,” Ruby exhaled, exasperated. “Tommy, settle down. He just dumped me. Hurt my feelings. It’s not a huge deal. It happens.”

He shut his mouth, feeling stupid. Even if her boyfriend was mean to her, Tommy knew she wouldn’t tell him. Why would she? Who the fuck was he, anyway? Just one of her clients. Some dude with an anger management issue who wouldn’t let her look at him when they fucked.

“If you say so.” He scuffed his boots against the concrete barrier at the end of a parking spot. He’d never broken up with anyone, really. He’d been broken up with, though. Plenty. Starting with his brother, who ditched out on him in favor of staying with his girlfriend and Pops.

After a few moments of silence, Ruby took another step closer to Tommy. He could smell her skin, she was that close. She smelled like perfume and ginger. Shampoo, faintly. His nostrils flared, taking her in scent, and he fought the urge to take a step away from her. How could anyone break up with someone like her?

If she was his girlfriend, if he’d ever allow himself to get close to someone again, if she’d ever be with him, like for real, he’d never let her go. He felt dopey, thinking these sappy thoughts about a girl he barely even knew, but there was something about her. Or maybe it was the pills and the booze that were making him dopey. Who could say.

“Tommy,” Ruby whispered, leaning into him far enough that she could press her forehead into his shoulder. This was his cue to put his arms around her. He knew it was the cue. But he couldn’t do it. What if it was too much? What if he was reading this wrong?

“Take me home with you, OK?”

He wasn’t reading it wrong. But he still couldn’t bring himself to fold her into his arms, even though he wanted to. To spell it out, he murmured, “I don’t know if that’s—” He stopped himself and reached up to gently take her by the shoulders. “Ruby, I don’t have the money.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Ruby replied quickly.

“Or a car.”

At that, Ruby giggled. “It’s OK, Tommy. I already called a cab.”

“OK.”

“OK? I can spend the night at your place?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said quietly, rubbing her arms with his hands, trying to warm her up. 


	3. Round Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tommy has a bad dream and Ruby tells him something true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Fairly graphic description of a "friendly fire incident" in Iraq, in which Manny, canon dead best friend/brother, is killed. His death is not described in particular, but I talk about his dead body. 
> 
> Also, there's a panic attack and some attendant PTSD symptoms described in detail. 
> 
> And then there's sex. SO, in summary:
> 
> \- graphic violence  
> \- graphic description of death  
> \- graphic sex
> 
> Grown-up shit. Be advised.

CNN called it friendly fire, which is kind of fucked up when you think about it. Friendliness doesn’t really hold a lot of meaning during wartime, other than meaning some jerk is supposedly also on your side—whatever that side was.

Another word for it is fratricide: brother killing brother. Tommy wasn’t sure if that was irony or whatever, it being about brothers specifically, but it had special meaning for him: Manny was his brother from the Corps, but he was dead. Brendan was his brother from birth, but he might as well be dead, too. He didn’t know a lot about irony but Tommy knew something about brothers. And he knew that the concept of fratricide made him want to puke when he woke up in the middle of the night, shaking and sweating.

It was bright out, clear that day. Noon in Iraq. The unit—three squads—had been pinned down between two veritable shitstorms for a half a day, with a busted transport and low munitions. Someone called in an airstrike, as they were supposed to. After the strike, the move was that they’d bug out toward the east to join another unit.

It was a nice, sunny day. Good visibility. Shouldn’t have been a problem.

But bombs meant for some other assholes dropped on their heads anyway. Somebody’s coordinates were misheard or transcribed wrong, maybe. Tommy went over and over and over it in his head, later.

Actually, he thought about it obsessively the whole way out of country, while the rest of his brain and body were on autopilot. That’s the only way he could go AWOL, really—in a fugue state. And that’s what he did: He took the fuck off. Didn’t think about it much. Just started running to the west. Maybe everyone would think he died too. His death—death by friendly fire, death by fuck-up—would be on their hands, too.

But, as soon as he was in Texas, with Pilar and Manny’s kids, he stopped trying to figure it out. He stopped thinking altogether. What did it matter, anyway, why it happened. It happened.

When the first bomb hit, Tommy knew they were fucked and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. His squad had the flag out and were waving like idiots, thinking that the planes would somehow see them. Even if they had, though, even if the pilots miraculously noticed that they were U.S. Marines, the bombs were already deployed. It happened fast after that, real fast. Hard. Sound and fucking fury. And then nothing.

When Tommy came around, his ears were ringing and he could barely see for all the dust and shit that had been sent into the air around him. Almost anything that could burn was on fire. Rounds going off as flames hit them. How about that for friendly fire? Your own bullet could get you. Tommy laid still for a full minute after his eyes opened, stunned dumb. He was eventually able to catch his breath well enough to choke on rubber fumes as he looked around. When he got up onto his hands and knees, he saw.

The unit was totally decimated. All gone. Three squads, one of which was under Tommy’s command as staff sergeant. Fifteen men, dead. Manny, too.

Manny—the closest person to Tommy in life—was also the closest body to him. _Why him and not me?_ went through his head like a thunderbolt. It all came down to positioning, in the end. Tommy was in the right place at the right time, behind their broke-down MATV. Manny was almost there with him but the details around that were missing, so Tommy didn’t know if Manny was coming or going when he got shredded by shrapnel. Half of Manny’s body was missing and the other half was covered in a sticky mix of blood and dirt and dust. Manny’s remaining eye was open, staring. Everything went very quiet.

Tommy scrambled to Manny on all fours, as fast as he could manage, but it didn’t matter how long it took him to get there. There was no reason to rush. There would be no cinematic moment as they clasped hands and said their sappy goodbyes. Because Manny was really most sincerely dead.

Everyone was.

Everybody but Tommy.

  


For months, Manny died over and over again in Tommy’s dreams. It was different almost every time, like his mind was trying to fill in a big blank spot with the worst possible options. Sometimes, it was Manny drawing on him first, like in a shitty Western. Other times, Manny set off an IED. Manny, drowning in that tank that wasn’t even their unit. Manny, twisted and mangled in a car crash. In the worst of his nightmares, though, it was Tommy that killed Manny, not a bomb. Manny, looking at him, betrayed, as Tommy pulled the trigger and put one right between his eyes.

The oxy, the percocet … they helped. Percocet with whiskey worked best. It knocked him the fuck out. Sure, maybe not exactly a good night’s sleep, and it isn’t really restful in the classic sense of the word, but in times of crisis, Tommy deeply believed that the warm, dark void of narcotics was better than the alternative. When that void swallowed him up, he was gone, too: no dreams, no nothing.

In a way, instead of Manny dying every night, it was Tommy. Then, after the void spit him back out, he’d wake up. Live another day. Fight. Die another death at night. Wake up. Repeat.

It was when he didn’t knock himself out with pills that there was trouble. With the side-effects of the pills being less than desirable, and his scaling back on their use in favor of winning his bouts and getting a boner once in a while, his night terrors were happening more and more. He couldn’t quite tap out and sink into that void like he used to. Instead, Tommy had to suffer through the normal body functions, like taking a piss in the middle of the night or suffering wicked bad cottonmouth, as well as abnormal brain shit, like waking up thinking that someone was in his apartment or that they were pinned down again, or that Manny’s heart was still beating when he got to him. Or, the worst, that maybe Tommy died too and all of this was just a long, realistic nightmare: his desertion, going a little nuts in the desert, coming across that tank with all the guys in it, trading his gun for cash. Then, his eventual escape to Jordan, a flight to Texas, and the look on Pilar’s face when she saw him walking up to the house. Everything.

When Tommy came to this time, he was on the floor of his closet. His body was going haywire. Wearing only boxers, he was shaking as if he was freezing to death, but he was sweating, too. His eyes were open but he couldn’t see. A woman’s voice was calling his name: _Tommy, Tommy._

As his eyes adjusted to the dim darkness, he could see that there was someone there, just outside the open closet door. Thata voice came from a girl wearing a white t-shirt that was too big. Long black hair, brown skin, gleaming white teeth that shining in the dim gloominess. She was kneeling on the carpet, reaching toward his knees, which were folded up against him. He was as small as he can get, hiding.

“Tommy!? Are you OK? Oh my god,” she whispered.

“Ah, fuck.” He couldn’t catch his breath, and his heart was racing. He pressed his back against the furthermost wall of the closet, gasping for air.

“What’s happening?” She sounded scared. Almost as scared as he was.

Some fog cleared a bit and Tommy remembered: Ruby. His place. He came back to himself so slowly, piecing together what the fuck was happening. Earlier: John and Chris and Chinese food. Ruby. Fortune cookies. A taxi. She asked for a shirt to sleep in. Tommy offered to sleep on the couch but she refused, saying he should sleep in his own bed, with her. A soft kiss on the mouth before she asked if it was OK if they could just sleep, for now.

“No sexy stuff, OK?”

Ruby had fit herself against him like one of those clip-on koalas from the ’80s. Tommy took a while to drift off, unfamiliar with the feeling of someone sleeping close to him. She smelled so good that it made him feel woozy and high. As soon as he relaxed enough to lose consciousness, though, it seemed like the next thing he knew, he was in the closet, freaking the fuck out.

“What do I do?” she urged, finally getting close enough to him that she could put her hand on his arm. “Are you having a heart attack?”

Tommy shook his head and tried to take a deep breath. It was like his lungs were filled up with water. He could only get a little air in there, no matter how hard he tried. “No,” he choked. Then, with hardly enough wind in him to get it out, he grunted, “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

“Do you know who I am?”

Tommy nodded quickly, swiping a hand over his face to realize that it was wet. Not just from sweat, either—he’d been crying. “Yeah. Ruby.”

“Oh my god, you scared me so bad. You were yelling! I thought you were getting attacked or something,” Ruby added, shakily. She rubbed his arm lightly but he gently pulled it away, not wanting to be touched right then.

“Just gimme a second,” he whispered. Had he really just been yelling? His voice came out raspy when he added, “It’s OK. Just go back to bed.”

She snorted lightly, breaking into a smile. “No way. I’m never sleeping again. I think I’M the one having a heart attack.”

Tommy nodded apologetically, finally able to inhale and exhale fully, relaxing his shoulders a bit. He felt like a fucking idiot, cowering in his closet. Scared by a bad dream—like a little kid. Yelling like a maniac. What the fuck.

“Can I get you anything?” Ruby offered.

He shook his head no, although he wanted to get up and get himself a drink of water. Maybe take a couple of pills.

“Just give me a second. It’s fine. I’m sorry.”

Ruby sat back on her heels, looking at him carefully. “It’s OK. It was just _una pesadilla_ or something. Do you wanna talk about it?”

No, he didn’t to talk about his bad dream. She seemed sort of relieved when he shook his head.

They sat together on the floor, in silence, for the next five minutes. Ruby rubbed his arm again, trying to comfort him—which mostly didn’t work. When Tommy eventually crawled out of the closet and got to his feet, he didn’t know what to say. Ruby awkwardly stood up too, hesitating before she put her arms around his waist and pressed her face against his chest. Her hair felt soft against his fingers when he reluctantly returned the hug, hoping she couldn’t hear his heart still racing.

Pulling away after a moment, Tommy went to the bathroom to be alone. To take a couple of pills. OK, several pills, followed up by a strong three-gulp pull off a bottle of Jameson in the kitchenette. He was going to get to that void if he died trying. How fucking embarrassing, losing his shit like that. He should have known better. He shouldn’t have let Ruby come home with him. It wasn’t safe. It definitely wasn’t cool. His problems were just that: his.

He stood at the sink for a long time, reading the back of a cereal box over and over as he tried to calm down. When the pills finally started to kick in, Tommy shuffled back to bed. Ruby, despite saying she’d never sleep again, was already passed out and sprawled out across his single bed.

 

It was still dark when Tommy next woke up, much more gently. Ruby was still pressed closely to his side, with one leg thrown over his thighs and one arm across his chest, and her mouth moved against his neck. Cracking one eye open and tucking his chin toward his chest, Tommy peeked at her. Her eyes were closed, long lashes curled against the top of her cheek, but her lips were moving across his skin in a trail of soft kisses. He reached over to comb her hair away from her face so he could see her better and, as he did, caught her smiling into his shoulder. She was awake and didn’t seem to hate him, so maybe it wasn’t a mistake to bring her home after all.

“Mm, morning.” His voice was croaky and rough, unused for however many hours.

Ruby hummed in agreement against his neck and he could feel her tongue lapping at the skin under his ear. Then a soft, wet kiss under his jaw, and Tommy relaxed his head back down into the pillow. He felt good. Warm, and logey. Thick-blooded, though, with a slow heartbeat and heavy limbs. That would be the percocets.

Ruby’s hand that was stretched across his chest folded at the elbow and he felt her fingers lightly resting on the other side of his neck while she intensified her kisses at this throat. Those same fingers danced lightly across his clavicle, over his chest, grazing his nipple, and then lower. His stomach jumped when she slid her hand flat against his skin, reaching into his shorts in one smooth, deft movement.

 _Nothing doing, down there_ , Tommy thought dimly. That would also be the percocet. His shame didn’t keep Ruby from reaching further down, until her fingers were loosely encircling his soft cock. He barely breathed while she did it, trying to mentally will some blood into his dick, give her something to grab onto, something to play with. Her hand felt good anyway, and he exhaled with a low, soft moan. She didn’t linger very long, though, choosing instead to move her hand out of his shorts on onto his wrist, which had been resting against his hip. He followed her lead as she pulled his hand toward her, and had to reluctantly open his eyes to figure out what was she doing.

Tommy got his answer after Ruby quickly wiggled out of her panties using her other hand. She moved into a more receptive position and gently pressed his fingers against her pussy.

Tommy lifted his head in surprise, hardly able to believe how wet and hot she was. Did she wake up like that? A broad smile spread across her face, her eyes still closed, and Tommy groaned happily. Seems she did, and she was totally soaked. Ruby released his hand and he took it from there, dipping his middle finger into the soft folds of her cleft.  

“Jesus,” Tommy exhaled, turning his face toward her just in time for her mouth to find his. He closed his eyes again and felt himself slip into a different kind of void.

Ruby’s mouth was as soft and hot and wet as she was down below, with the added bonus of her tongue curling softly into his mouth. His other arm was still under her head, and he used it to pull her head closer to his, deepening the kiss.

Tommy loved kissing. Every time he did it, he wondered why he went so long without. Good kisses—lazy, slow, and burning—were definitely few and far between in his life. He couldn’t even remember the last time someone else’s tongue had been in his mouth. Almost on cue, Ruby withdrew hers so she could lick at his upper lip and then lightly bite his lower.

“I thought—” Tommy started, pulling himself away from her mouth reluctantly. He had to know. “I thought you said no sexy stuff.”

“Mmm, yeah,” Ruby murmured before pressing a kiss against his chin. “But that was last night.” She paused dramatically. “And I wasn’t horny last night,” she concluded, moving her lips back to his.

No complaints from Tommy. The pads of his index and middle fingers were working in tandem, finding the swollen spot at the top of her wetness and nestling against it. “But you are now.”

“Yeah, Tommy ... I am now,” she sighed happily, slowly rolling her hips against his fingers, letting him know he’d found the right place to rub and gently pinch. “Why? Aren’t you?”

Tommy groaned under his breath, embarrassed. There was some movement of blood to his cock but everything in his body was slow to respond. Shouldn’t have taken pills. He just wanted to rest, that was it—but now, he wanted to fuck and his dick wasn’t waking up.

“I, uh …” Tommy started to apologize for his dick not being at full sail, like it should be, but it was pretty obvious, so he didn’t elaborate.

Instead, he dipped both fingers into Ruby, gathering more slick moisture to use against her clit. Her head lolled back against his shoulder, so he took the opportunity to tuck his face into her neck, to return the favor by sucking and licking at the velvety skin of her throat. In turn, Ruby lifted her knee that was splayed across his hips even further, both so he could dig deeper into her and so the inside of her knee would rub against his groin. His slowly swelling cock appreciated it and so did he, despite his embarrassment at his dick’s lack of enthusiasm.

Eager to please, nonetheless, he fucked her with his fingers—slowly, at first, and then with increasing speed and intensity. Ruby was into it, he could tell—her mouth was wide open, panting with quick, shallow breaths, and she was grinding herself hard against his hand. It didn’t take long until she was coming, bucking against him with her lower half and clutching at his chest, while another string of ooohs and ahhs and muddled Spanglish escaped from her mouth. He watched in awe as she gasped through her climax and her pussy squeezed and spasmed around his fingers.

Before he knew if Ruby was totally done, or if there was more orgasm that he could wring out of her, she’d pulled away from him and thrown back the blanket, exposing his lower half and his slick-covered hand.

“Ruby,” he warned her, not wanting to embarrass her, or himself. It didn’t matter, as she found out pretty quick that there wasn’t much going on down there when she roughly pulled his boxers down off his hips and over his thighs. Tommy didn’t move to cover himself but he squirmed uncomfortably. “I don’t—”

But then her mouth was on him. He was half soft, but still … it felt like magic. That soft, hot mouth that he’d just been drowning in was now applied confidently and selflessly to his cock. _Oh god. There it was. A better kind of void._

Who knew that it still felt good to get your dick sucked, even when it was mostly soft? Not Tommy. He didn’t know that at all. But there it was—Ruby’s lips and tongue licking and coaxing at him, making the magic happen. She didn’t let her hands stay idle, either: one hand gripped and kneaded at the base of his dick, and the fingers of her other hand rolled and pulled at his balls. With the edge of a fingernail, she lightly scratched at the underside of his nuts and Tommy just about jumped out of his skin.

“Holy fuck,” he grunted. She couldn’t know how good that felt. But she probably knew, as his body responded with a throb of his dick as blood coursed into it. It was working. Even through the percocet, he was getting hard.

“You’re gonna get hard for me, Tommy.” She said it like it was a fact. “Forget all about your bad dream.”

Why’d she have to go and mention that? All the same, her facts were quickly becoming indisputable. He groaned in agreement. “Yeah, _fuck_ —I am. Don’t stop.”

She was relentless in her pursuit of what made him quiver and moan, not stopping to ask if he liked this or that, or what he wanted, or what cost extra. She even swiped the pad of one of her thumbs lower, briefly pressing it against his ass, which made his eyes practically roll back in his head. Jesus Christ, this girl. She knew how to touch him.

When his dick was good and stiff, Ruby sat up and ran her tongue over her lips, raising an eyebrow at him cheekily. She jacked him lightly with one hand and swiped at her mouth with the back of the other.    

“You’re amazing,” Tommy gasped, pressing his hips upward into her grip.

“Yeah, _lo sé_ ,” Ruby smiled, winking. No false modesty there. Tommy tried to smile but it came out as more of a grimace, as Ruby’s hand let go of his cock for a moment in favor of doing that thing with the fingernail on the underside of his sack. He couldn’t stifle a sharp groan. “But, Tommy, we gotta—”  
  
“Please don’t say I can’t fuck you,” Tommy whined. Now that he was hard, he was single-minded. He wanted to be inside her immediately.

“No, you can,” Ruby nodded. Her hand moved back to his cock. “I want you to. I want all this inside of me. But listen …”

What else would Tommy be doing? He was held in rapt attention. Every bit of him was paying attention to what Ruby was saying. He waited, looking at her expectantly. _God, was she going to make him pay her first? Like, right now?_ The thought interrupted the swelling of his dick a bit. But just a bit. Climb every mountain, forge every stream, or whatever. Honestly, he’d do anything she wanted him to, just so long as she didn’t stop touching him.

“We can do this, but you can’t be my client after,” Ruby explained, straight-faced and firm. She bit her bottom lip after saying it, less as an effort to be cute as to express her concern over how he’d take the news.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Ruby said patiently, slowing her hand a bit but continuing to pump his cock in her fist, “I mean that I can’t fuck you for free … and then start charging you again. That’s not how I operate.”

“Oh,” Tommy said, feeling a pang of sadness at the thought that this, their first free fuck, might also be their last. “But, does that mean that I can’t see you again?”

Ruby smiled, finally, looking a little relieved. “No. I mean, not like that, you can’t. Not as an escort. If we hang out, it’ll be as friends.”

“Friends?” Tommy lifted his eyebrow. Hopefully, he added, “Friends who fuck?”

Ruby shrugged lightly, still smiling. “Maybe. I mean, I’m single now, so I can do what I want.”

“You could always do what you want, baby,” Tommy murmured appreciatively. It was out of his mouth before he could stop it and Ruby picked up on it right away.

“Oooh, you called me ‘baby,’” she teased, her smile getting somehow even bigger. “Te oí.”  

She leaned over him and kissed him sweetly on the mouth, still giggling a little. God, she was so cute. Tommy couldn’t wait a second longer. He pulled her onto him, her ass resting squarely on his hips.

“You should take that shirt off,” he advised, before nipping at her bottom lip.

“I do what I want,” Ruby cracked back sharply, pulling away, and for a second, Tommy was worried that he’d been too bossy. He wasn’t her client anymore, and as she’d only been broken up with several hours before, he figured it was a little premature that he was her new boyfriend.

Seeing his expression, Ruby laughed and sat up on his hips, grinding her pussy against the ridge of his cock as she did so. When she was upright, she drew the tee over her head in one slow movement. Seeing her breasts and all that gorgeous skin exposed, Tommy sat up and ducked his head enough that he could suck her perked nipples with enthusiasm.

She ground against him as he tongued around the puckered pink flesh of her tits and wiggled into what he assumed was a more comfortable position. As it happened, the tip of his cock was rubbing against her wet pussy. So close. He could just thrust up even the tiniest bit and he’d be inside her. It seemed like she knew it, too, and she teased him by arching her back just enough to take the very tip of him into her. He lifted his head from her breast to look up at her face, confused. Bareback was extra, she’d said. But what about now?

“Do you want me to get a rubber?” He asked, trying to be practical, trying to do the right thing.

“Uh-uh,” Ruby whispered. “You clean?”

Tommy nodded eagerly. Of course he was clean. He’d just been in the service for almost ten years and he didn’t really fuck people he didn’t know. Too paranoid. “You?” he returned.

“Yeah, baby,” Ruby assured him, sinking down onto his cock just a little more as she looked into his eyes. He didn’t mind that she called him baby, that time. Things were different. “Don’t worry about it, OK?”

It felt unbelievably good to have skin-to-skin contact with her like this and Tommy felt lightheaded, woozy. He kept eye contact with her as he tangled his fingers in her long hair, spanning both hands across the entirety of her lower back. Studying her face, he pushed his hips up into her as he pressed her downward with his hands leveraged against her back. Her lip curled just a bit as the thickest part of his cock passed through the tightest threshold of her pussy. She locked eyes with him as he pushed into her. It was slow, sweet torture until he was all the way rooted in her, and then she was grinding on him again. She fit around him perfectly and he marveled at how beautiful she was as she stretched and relaxed in order to accommodate him fully. He was in. Deeply in.

  


After, when they were both wrung out and covered in sweat and sticky come and soaking in whatever sunlight made it through the half-closed blinds in Tommy’s bedroom, Tommy held Ruby against his chest while he caught his breath. She lazily raked her nails across the skin of his arms, which made him want to purr like a big damn pussycat.

“Fuck, Ruby, that feels good,” he sighed.

She asked, “Hey, Tommy?” Her voice was hushed but happy.

“Yeah?” He lifted his head a little to see if maybe her hair had gotten caught under his elbow or something but she wiggled closer to him so he guessed maybe not.

“My name is actually Lucy,” Ruby said. “You should call me Lucy.”

Head still raised, he twisted his neck so he could see her face, see if she was fucking with him. She looked back at him, smiling and letting her gaze travel over his face.

“Not Ruby?”

“That’s my escort name. You can call me that if you want, but my real name is Lucy.”

“Lucy?”

“Lucinda.”

Tommy thought about it. Lucinda. He liked it. It was like a secret, her real name.

Now he was the only liar. Tommy Riordan wasn’t really his name, either. But he wasn’t going to tell her that. Maybe someday, but not someday soon.

“That’s weird,” Tommy mumbled, setting up a joke, trying to push any sour thoughts of his past out of his mind. If he could hang onto the good feelings for just a little longer, he knew he’d be OK.

“What is? Lucinda? It’s a family name!” Ruby—Lucy—propped herself up on her arm so she could pout at Tommy with light offense.

“No, I was just going to say …” he reached his arms around her soft, warm body to pull her half on top of him again. Unable to keep a straight face, Tommy’s face broke into a grin as he finished, “That’s my real name too: Lucy.”

“Oh my god, shut up!” Lucy snorted and lowered her face down to his shoulder, where she bit into the meat of his trapezius muscle.

“Hey! Watch it,” he barked out, laughing at the sharp, light bite of her teeth. The first laugh he’d had in ages. “What’s wrong with that—I’m … Lucy Tommy.”

“You suck,” Lucy griped against his shoulder, petulant but giggling anyway. “I was telling you something private to me, you joker.”

Tommy jostled her into a more comfortable (for him) position and apologized by brushing her damp hair away from her neck so he could kiss her under her ear. No actual apologies, just soft noises as he made amends to her via kisses.

“Hey, Lucy Tommy? There’s something else,” Lucy murmured, baring her neck more as she twisted her limbs around him. “Can I stay here for a couple of days?”

Tommy couldn’t imagine why she’d want to stay in his shithole apartment, but if it meant that he could be naked with her more often, he didn’t see any downsides. “Yeah, sure,” he agreed. “Why—what’s up?”

“I have to get my shit out of Rob’s place and I just don’t …” Lucy started, trailing off.

Tommy paused for a second, surprised. She LIVED with that guy? Did that mean she was moving in with him? Not that that would be a bad thing, but it was all happening kinda fast. His confusion must have been evident because she pulled back and corrected his assumption.

“Just for a couple of days, _lo prometo_.” Lucy’s lips were promising him one thing but he thought he could see something else entirely in her eyes. She needed his help and he wanted to give it to her.

In other words, Tommy was a fucking goner.


	4. Round Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tommy tries to remember what having fun looks like.

Tommy and Lucy spent the morning together—in bed, just like the fortune cookies said they should. Neither of them had anything to do that they couldn’t get out of, and hanging out in bed was a lot more fun than working or training, so they made a day of it.

When he realized that once again he didn’t have anything to offer Lucy aside from water, beet juice, or whiskey, Tommy valiantly pulled on a pair of sweats and a hoodie to make a quick run to the corner store for provisions. Including a 20-ounce Diet Coke and “anything gummy” for Lucy, by request.

The corner store was more like a place where people bought smokes and 40s than any sort of a deli with real food, but there was OJ and chocolate milk in one of the fridges. Tommy grabbed a tube of those tiny powdered doughnuts on impulse at the register, doubling down on taking a day off from his already half-assed training regimen. Call it a cheat day—fuck it. He wasn’t even training for anything real, anything serious. Plus, his knee and shoulder felt solid. No pain meant he didn’t need to take any pills, which had the added benefit that he would be ready to go the next time Lucy started kissing on his neck.

Before he put his hand on the doorknob to his apartment, Tommy paused. If the door was unlocked, that meant Lucy was gone. If it was still locked, like he’d left it, she was in there, waiting for him.

Still locked. Tommy wasn’t sure he’d ever been so relieved to find a locked door before.

He set the plastic bag down on his kitchen counter and took out Lucy’s soda pop, careful not to shake it, along with the gummies. When he got closer to the bedroom door, he heard Lucy’s voice. Her voice was hushed as she said quickly into the phone, “ _Si,_  OK? Gotta go. I’ll check in later.” She pushed a button on her phone and looked up at him. “Oh my _god_ , give it over,” she cried, throwing her phone down on the bed and making grabby hands toward the Diet Coke.

Tommy prickled, suspicious. He handed the soda over and gestured toward the phone. “Who were you talking to? Everything OK?”

Lucy drained at least half of the 20 ounce pop in one go, keeping one eye on him as she did it, daring him to comment on how quickly she was guzzling it. With a theatrical “ahhhhh,” she grinned at him. “Yeah, everything’s good. It was work.”

“Work,” Tommy repeated, his stomach dropping. “You mean, the agency?”

“What? No,” Lucy replied, quickly shaking her head and capping her soda. “My other job, baby.”

Tommy nodded, trying not to let the relief show itself on his face. He laid back on the bed, kicking his sneakers off.

“So happy I can call you baby now,” Lucy grinned, setting her soda down before she climbed on top of him like he was a damn jungle gym. “It was hard not saying it.”

Tommy wondered if she called all her clients baby. Maybe it was easier to do that than it was to keep their names straight. He groused a little and asked her why it was so hard.

Lucy wiggled her hips until she was seated firmly against his pelvis, back rounded so she could look down at him. Like it was obvious, she teased, “Because you’re such a _babe_.”

“A babe,” he repeated again, doubtful. No one had ever described him like that, he was pretty sure.

“Yeah, a BABE.” Lucy spread her fingers across his chest, pressing down. She raked her nails down his arms, ending with a squeeze on his forearms. “Mm, I like your body.”

“Yeah?” He flexed his pecs for her, feeling like a total cheeseball but doing it anyway. What was with him, doing that shit? That wasn’t him. That was never him. These days, he was the guy who woke up in the closet, freaking out, not some dumb Mr Muscles, showing off for a girl. But something felt different now. Something about Lucy looking at him just made him feel good now. Warm.

“Yeah. And your face.” With that, Lucy leaned further and kissed him on the lips. When she pulled away, the stretched-out T-shirt she was wearing fell against his chest and he cheekily snuck a peek down the front of it, to her body underneath She caught him and giggled, playfully kissing him again, biting at his lips. As soon as she pulled away, she rounded and flexed her back to rub herself against the front of his sweats. “And your cock.”

“Do you now,” Tommy murmured, reaching his arms around her to take her hair into a loose cluster in his hands.

“Uh huh,” Lucy whispered, grinding against him. He’d only been away from her for 10 minutes but he suddenly wanted to be inside her again.

“I gotta eat something,” Tommy interrupted, as his stomach grumbled on cue. He added, hopefully, “I bought doughnuts.”

Her eyes lit up and he felt himself go a little dizzy. He was ravenous, but he also wanted to feel Lucy warm and soft against him. Bury himself in her wet tightness, make her call his name. Stifling a groan, he promised Lucy that after the doughnuts, he was going to ruin her.  


 

Tommy asked her about her other job over chocolate milk and powdered doughnuts.

“It’s just retail. It’s dumb,” Lucy shrugged, unfazed, licking the white powdered sugar from her fingers. “My cousin owns this shop in Little Village and I’m supposed to work there three days a week.”

“What sort of shop?”

“Like, women’s clothes. A boutique, I guess?” Lucy reached for another doughnut. They were shitty doughnuts, if Tommy was honest. She deserved better. “It’s OK. My cousin is cool and gives me a discount. She even lets me buy for the store. That’s what I want to do, someday—be a buyer.”

“Does she know about your, uh, side job?” Tommy asked speculatively, lifting the chocolate milk up to his mouth.

“My huh? Oh, I have three jobs. They’re _all_ side jobs. You mean the escort stuff, though?”

He nodded. Lucy’s legs were splayed over his lap, and he ran his hand over her thighs, listening.

“No fucking way,” Lucy’s eyes got wide and she shuddered. “Nobody in my family knows that. They all think I’m selling my eggs—which is almost as bad. Trust me, you don’t know my family. They seriously think selling my eggs is a sin! Can you IMAGINE!”

He shook his head. He couldn’t imagine having a family who gave a shit, no. “And your other other job?”

“Oh, I work at Barneys. I’m supposed to apprentice with the buyer there, for school.”

Tommy lifted his eyebrow, impressed by her hustle. “You go to school, too?”

“Yeah, sorta. Community college. But I’m saving up to go to FIT in New York,” she explained, beaming slightly.

“FIT?”

“Fashion school,” she explained. “In the city. But that’s a long way off.”

“New York,” Tommy mused, thinking about how much harder it would be to save for a fancy art school in New York by working retail. He’d never been to New York. Just a couple states away from PA but what the fuck excuse did a teenage kid have to go to a city like that?

Lucy inched her toes across his obliques as she looked at Tommy quietly. Fashion school. God, she must think he looked like a bum, in his sweats every day. He wasn’t ever what anyone would call a snappy dresser, but since he left the Corps, things had gone decidedly downhill. And, as long as he only got these stupid back-lot fights he was getting, he was going to stay that way. He felt shame wash over him, a hot wave of embarrassment.

The only thing that ever really fit him right was a uniform. And look where that got him.

“Tell me something about you,” Lucy prompted.

He groaned, trying to play it off. Distract her by tickling behind her knee. She kept prodding him with her toe, though, so he relented. “Like what,” Tommy replied reluctantly.

“Something good. Something interesting.”

“There’s nothing interesting about me,” Tommy shook his head. “Trust me. Nothing.”

Lucy didn’t accept that. “Come on. Nothing?”

“Lucy … uh, I don’t really like talking about myself,” he confessed. Didn’t want to talk about himself. Didn’t want to talk about fighting. Didn’t want to talk about why he woke up yelling in the middle of the night.

She probably felt like it was his turn to share. Is this something she did for the girlfriend experience, Tommy wondered. Anyway, she wouldn’t take no for an answer. “What about your family? Where are they?”

Tommy kept his eyes on her legs, staying silent. He couldn't go there. If he started talking about the past, he would lose it again, and wouldn’t be able to blame it on a bad dream this time. But he had to give her something.

“Uh, my family … yeah. I had a brother, but he—um, well, he passed.” It wasn’t a lie, exactly. Of omission, maybe, but Manny was his brother and Manny was dead, so. There’s something interesting for ya, Luce.

“Oh Tommy, _lo ciento_. That sucks. What about your mom?”

“Her too. When I was 18,” Tommy nodded, his expression blank. He glanced at Lucy, hoping she’d understand, now, why he didn’t want to talk about his family. Before she could ask about his dad—about Paddy fuckin’ Conlon—he added, “And I never really knew my dad.”

Also not entirely a lie. No one ever really knew Paddy Conlon. He was unknowable.

“So, it’s just you?” Her voice softened. Tommy could tell she regretted asking. _Good_ , he thought.

He shrugged. “Just me.”

“But that’s OK,” she urged, pressing her foot against his hand softly. “You’re enough.”

Tommy thought about that for a second, trying to figure out how to tell her how wrong she was about that without letting on exactly how wrong she really had him. It was _not_ OK. He was _not_ enough.

“Tell me something else, then,” Lucy prompted again. “Something good.”

Tommy tried to come up with something good, or fun, or at least not depressing. Finally, he had it. “Uh … _entiendo español_?” Did he say that right? No good if he said he understood Spanish if he fucked up the Spanish part.

Lucy’s eyes widened and she burst out laughing, all the seriousness abandoned. He’d gotten her. Finally, something good he could tell her. She was incredulous, mouth wide open in surprise, even when she laughed. “You do!? _De veras_? How?”

“It’s a long story,” Tommy shook his head, a tiny smile turning up the corners of his mouth. “I understand it better than I speak it, but …”

“But I can’t keep secrets from you by saying it in Spanish?” Lucy was teasing him but his smile dropped enough for her to notice. She quickly added, “I’m kidding. No secrets, Tommy. OK? No secrets.”

Sure. No secrets.

Tommy sighed and nodded, pulling her toward him by the legs. He was ready to make good on his promise to ruin her.

A month before, Tommy wasn’t sure he’d ever get a boner again, and now he wasn’t sure he’d ever fucked this much. At least not in such a short time. He didn’t always know what to say to Lucy, what to talk about, especially when she asked him questions—but when it came to the physical stuff, everything went smooth.

He even let her look at him while they did it. At least, he didn’t say anything about it when she did. When her gaze got to be too much for him, he closed his eyes and pretended hers were, too.

No dreams, that night. In fact, Tommy slept through without the aid of a single pill. A nip of whiskey, sure, but other than that, he was pretty sure it was all Lucy’s doing. She wore him down.

 _In bed_ , he mentally added, and then felt guilty. All this stuff that he took for granted before everything went to shit in Iraq—even the shit he took for granted in Chicago—was stuff that Manny would never get to enjoy or even bitch about ever again. It’s the first thing that Tommy thought when he opened his eyes in the morning: _It should have been me._ It took a lot of distraction to get that line out of his head, and luckily, he now had a distraction that was way more fun than going to the gym.

 

 

Lucy left his place the next morning, but only after they fucked yet again. He warned her that he might actually be fucked out this time—but she laughed and said she didn’t believe him.

She also said she didn’t really like the beet juice Tommy was drinking, but she definitely liked riding him on his busted couch. He wasn’t even sure how that even happened: one second, she was laughing at him, saying beet juice tasted like if dirt went sour, and the next, she was on his lap and had her tongue in his ear.

That morning was the best sex yet. Different, somehow. Sweeter. Real gentle and soft, with no sharp edges. He wasn’t sure if she liked being fucked like that, or even if he liked doing it like that, but as she was sore and he was tired, that’s how they did it—kissing the whole time.  


Getting Lucy the coconut shampoo (and the conditioner—Suave; just for when she was at his place) she’d asked him for—specifically, where he’d get it—popped into Tommy’s head while he was back at the gym, and he subsequently caught a left hook directly to the face. Idiot. Off his game. He was going to embarrass himself, if he didn’t get his shit together after 36 hours of thinking primarily with his dick. His head wasn’t in the neighborhood, much less the ring.

He couldn’t stop thinking about her and their cheat day. Mostly good things, but a little worry, too—like, maybe he should have gone with her to her ex’s house to pick up her things. It didn’t matter, ultimately. She said it was no problem and immediately changed the subject to thanking him because he bought Lucy the coconut hair stuff at CVS. She stayed at his house every night after that anyway, insisting that she wasn’t moving in. She said she could stay with her girlfriend as long as she had to, but the girl had a new boyfriend and she’d rather not listen to them fuck all night. She’d rather be in Tommy’s bed, she said, making her own noises.

Two weeks into this indulgent new regimen, which included pizza delivery and sharing a six-pack with Lucy every couple of days, Tommy found himself opting out of sparring in favor of sequestering himself alone in the corner with a heavy bag. There was no one worth fighting around, he figured, so he might as well fight himself for 10 minutes. It didn’t take long before he thought of something that lit a fire under his ass: Lucy (Ruby, then) suggesting that maybe he pick up extra work by driving her, or someone just like her, around to visit clients and act as a heavy if things got weird. Even though he mostly managed to block out what Lucy did for work since then, even though that was how he met her, it’d been itching in the back of his mind. It was the only time he’d gotten worked up with her, really. Other than that, he’d been smiling a lot more often. But the suggestion still pissed him off, and it wasn’t hard to summon that anger.

If Lucy thought he needed money, which he did, that was just fucked up. But he couldn’t prove to her, in his current state, that he wasn’t the loser he appeared to be. He couldn’t even prove that to Pilar—who was raising Manny’s kids by herself, without Tommy’s or anybody’s help—and she actually knew him when he had his shit together.

Sweaty as hell, Tommy was still lost in his anger and not done putting a beatdown on something that didn’t hit back—but he needed a drink and took a break. While refilling his water bottle (laboriously, as he had to remove his gloves first) at the fountain, he caught sight of Lucy’s familiar face in the small, shabby lobby of the gym. She looked so out of place there, in her street clothes and shiny hair, with her big smile lighting everything up. Nobody smiles like that at a gym—especially not a boxing gym. Tommy did a double take when he saw her, but when he saw who she was talking to, it was like a needle screeching across a record in his head: Richard.

What the fuck.

Tommy was in the lobby before he knew what was happening, driven by instinct and the surge of adrenaline he got from his rage stacked on anger. It was all he could do to not cold-cock that piece of shit Richard, which would probably result in him being banned from the gym. Instead, he got real close to Lucy.

“Hey!” she cried out, happily. She threw her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek—immediately rubbing at what was probably the lipstick mark she’d left behind. He subtly ducked his head away from her touch. Cheerily, she explained, “I wanted to surprise you!”

Tommy stiffened, unable to return the embrace or the kiss because he was already full-bore glaring at Richard. “What,” he asked flatly, twisting away from Lucy to address him. The stupid expression on Rich’s dumbass face revealed that he was going several mental calculations. His eyes darted between Lucy and Tommy multiple times before he broke out into a grin.

In response, Tommy glowered. “Can I help you with something, man?”

“Tommy,” Lucy cautioned, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder, only for Tommy to shrug it off. Not in the mood for cuddling, thanks. Going to rip Rich’s head off real quick.

“Nah, Tommy,” Richard deferred, taking a large step backward. “I was just saying hi to Ruby. I didn’t know she—er, you ... Anyway, I’ll, uh, leave you to it.”

“Yeah?” Tommy challenged him, bodily putting himself between Lucy and Richard. That fucking jackass. He looked like a weasel, his beady eyes darting past Tommy’s shoulder to where Lucy stood behind him.

“Yeah,” Richard said nervously, backing up even further. As soon as he was out of arm’s reach, he turned and bugged out back into the gym like a fuckin’ creep.

Tommy was absolutely vibrating. He hadn’t felt like that since he was in Iraq, around live ammunition. Civilian life didn’t really include many opportunities for that kind of cortisol spike, that rush of adrenaline. Being a soldier, though, it happened all the time. It was familiar to him, if not maybe a little comfortable.

When Richard was out of sight, he spun around to face Lucy, growling, “What are you doing here?”

Lucy looked confused. “What do you mean? I just said. I wanted to surprise you.”

“I don’t want you coming down here like this,” he snarled, realizing how psycho the statement sounded once it hit the air. He took a deep breath, trying to calm down. The sweat was cooling on him even as he exhaled the breath with a loud huff.

She looked unsurprised by his statement. Annoyed. “You don’t have a phone or nothing, and I got off work, so … so what? I thought we could—”

Tommy took Lucy by the arm and gently pulled her toward the door of the lobby. She didn’t like that at all, protesting with a muttered phrase about him being a fucking _cavernícola_ , and by the time they made it onto the sidewalk outside, she’d wrenched her elbow out of Tommy’s grasp.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” she seethed, her eyebrows knit together in consternation. “I just wanted to see where you work out. You didn’t need to drag me outside!”

It was freezing and Tommy felt like he’d been plunged into an ice bath. On the upside, the cold did a bit toward cooling his hot head. On the downside, his muscles were probably going to seize up. He looked down at his feet, still huffing and puffing, still in the middle of a rage attack.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, the fire slightly doused by the icy look she was giving him. “I just saw you talking to that fucking asshole and ... got carried away.”

“Yeah, you did!” Lucy zipped up her coat and shoved her hands in her pockets, clearly angry with him. “It was embarrassing!”

“He called you Ruby,” Tommy blurted out as he suddenly realized that Richard knew her escort name. Called her by it. Not Lucy— _Ruby_. His rage was summoned back to him, rolling over him like a hot wind in the desert.

“So what?” Lucy shrugged. She added, incredulously, “ _Estas celoso de ese pendejo?_ ”

“Should I be?” Why wouldn’t he be jealous? Richard, the escort king of Chicago, smirking at Lucy like it was no big thing. He really wanted to pulverize Richard’s spine in some kind of suplex move.

Before he entirely knew what he was saying, Tommy blurted out: “Why does he know you as Ruby?” Lowering his voice, he pointedly asked, “Have you … been with him?”

“Tommy,” Lucy sighed, the realization of what was happening dawning across her sweet, angry face. He _was_ jealous, yeah. Not specifically of that guy, but—maybe that guy, too? “What does it matter what he thinks my name is? I don’t know him.”

“But have you _been with him_?” Tommy repeated, practically panting with anger. He knew his nostrils were flaring, like they always did when he was really pissed off.

Lucy leveled her eyes at him, her voice firm as she said, “Tommy, that’s none of your business.”

“Yes, it is,” he countered. She wouldn’t be able to deny his logic: “If you’re with me, then it’s my business.”

Lucy’s lips pressed together tightly as she searched his face with her dark eyes. Shaking her head minutely, she said, “I don’t know how to talk to you when you’re like this, baby. I just wanted to come by and see you. Maybe see you punch somebody? Or maybe you’d get some food with me. I didn’t mean to get you all … whatever this is.” She gestured at him, standing rigidly in front of her, visibly shaking.

“You got with him?” Tommy whispered. “With that fuck?”

Lucy looked down at the sidewalk for a moment, but then swung her face back up to look him in the eyes as she said, “I didn’t ‘get with him,’ Tommy.”

“But he’s fucked you,” Tommy spat out. “He’s— _that fucking guy_?” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Or not hearing. What he was understanding.

“Can we talk about this later?” She looked cold, but he felt like he was on fire. His muscles were tensing up from the cold but the surge of endorphins kept him plenty warm.

“No. Now.”

Lucy threw her hands up, exasperated. “Jesus fucking Christ, fine: Yes, Tommy. I’ve been with him, OK? As a client. One time, months and months ago. Before I knew you.”

There. She said it. He nodded and took a step away from Lucy, staring at her. Why did he feel so betrayed? Why did everything feel different?

“Before you knew me,” Tommy repeated dully, feeling the bottom drop out of something inside his chest. The sweat dripping down his face got into his eye, so lifted the hem of his shirt to wipe his face as he processed her response. “You fucked him.”

“I mean …” Lucy wavered. “Technically, I fucked Jen—my friend? He hired two girls. He was in the mix for a minute or two. I don’t know. I don’t really remember. It was just _work_. You and me weren’t together!”

Tommy could feel his brain shutting down. Just work. This was a job for her. Just a job. He didn’t need to be jealous. He didn’t need to freak out. A job. One of three she had. It wasn’t like she was cheating on him. And yet. And yet. He felt like he was going to puke or explode. Or both.

“Are we—?” He asked her, serious and clipped. “Together?”

Lucy took her hands out of her pockets and closed the distance between them. Palms open, expression softer. “Tommy,” she urged. “Come on. Don’t do this right now.”

“Are we together, Lucy?”

She put her hands on his forearms, trying to get him to look at her by ducking her head down into his line of sight. “Baby, yeah, of course we are. I haven’t been—” she looked around and lowered her voice. “I haven’t been working because I have been busy with you. I’m not sleeping with anyone but you.”

Clenching and unclenching his fists, Tommy tried to stave off what felt like was going to be a complete meltdown. He was still breathing hard, but now that he knew the worst thing—that Richard had touched her, kissed her, been inside of her body—Tommy felt like he’d only clawed his way up to the top of a huge wall at the beginning of an obstacle course. Ahead of him were more things that would fuck him up and rip him apart. And after that, more. And after that, even more.

“I have to go back inside,” Tommy mumbled suddenly, pulling away from Lucy’s grip. “I’m freezing my nuts off out here.” He wasn’t, but he needed to get away.

Lucy shoved her hands back in her pockets. Sadly, she called after him, “Tommy, come on. Please. I’ll come over tonight and tell you anything you want to know.”

“Yeah, but see, Lucinda, I don’t want to know _anything_ ,” Tommy explained, his tone crueler than he intended. She looked so sweet and hurt. Her radiant smile was hidden behind a closed-lip frown, now. He did that. That was his fault.

He took a step toward the door and, reaching for the handle, glanced back around to sourly add, “Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow, OK?”

Lucy didn’t answer. Or, if she did, Tommy didn’t hear it, because he was back in the lobby of the gym, shivering.

“Hey, Tommy,” Luke said from behind the front counter. “Left your gloves by the fountain.”

Tommy could barely hear him over the sound of his own thoughts. “Yeah, OK,” he mumbled, moving in the opposite direction from the fountain and scanning the main floor for Richard.

He was about to get himself kicked out of this fucking gym. And it was gonna be worth it.


	5. Round Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tommy lets off a little steam and spoiler alert: It doesn't help.

Tommy found Richard, that fuck, on a stool next to the ring, watching a few sets of guys sparring against pads. He briefly looked at Tommy, clocking his locomotive-like approach but looked away with an air of panicked uncertainty, as if he was searching for a quick way out. There was no avoiding Tommy, though. Richard, thin-lipped and tense, looked like he was about to say something smart when Tommy got low and threw his shoulder into Richard’s torso. A for-real takedown, Tommy’s momentum carried the guy clean off the stool, into the air and onto his back on the wood floor with a heavy thud.

Surprised cries of protest came from at least three or four of the men around them, but Tommy ignored them all. He pinned Richard immediately with a knee on his chest, and pulled his arm back to throw a punch.

“HEY! Hey hey!” yelled whoever was behind Tommy. One of the coaches was using both his arms to restrain the fist that had yet to land its first blow on Richard. “Hey! Take it in the ring or knock it the fuck off!”

The coach and a couple other guys dragged Tommy off Richard. One of them must have been a cop, because he had Tommy’s arm in a lock behind his back before he knew what was happening. Tommy didn’t fight it, even though he was seething with rage. Instead, he was completely focused on Richard, who was sputtering some bullshit about being suckerpunched. Tommy hadn’t punched him. If he had, Richard wouldn’t be awake to complain.

“Cool it, boys,” the coach warned, helping Richard off the floor. Obviously it was not the first time he’d seen a spat kick off in the gym, most likely, so he pushed the age-old resolution of working it out in the ring. When Richard was up, Coach asked him explicitly, “Wanna take it in the ring ... or no?”

“Do it,” Tommy barked hoarsely, still restrained by Officer Helpful Bystander. “Come on, _Richie_. Get in the ring.”

Richard glared at the coach like he was out of his mind. “No fucking way!”

“No?” the coach confirmed. He patted Richard on the shoulder and said, “No problem. You’re OK, guy. Take a walk.”

Richard nodded, still looking scared even as he brushed imaginary dirt from his brand-new sweatshirt. Most everybody went back to what they were doing, except for the coach, Tommy and the cop. When Richard was out of earshot, he released his hold on Tommy’s arm with a curt, impersonal apology.

The coach came over, pretty steamed, and looked Tommy in the eye. “You either work your shit out in the ring or keep it out of this club, do you understand?” he said, gruff. The old man must have been a drill sergeant in a former life, because he didn’t even own the gym and there he was acting like he had a stake in what happened to it.

“No problem,” Tommy lied, still breathing hard. He gave the guy a nod and leaned over to dutifully pick up the stool he’d knocked over. Rubbing a hand over his face, and keeping his eyes down, Tommy stalked off in the opposite direction than Richard had gone, to throw anyone who might be watching off the scent. But, as soon as the coach had forgotten about the dust-up and turned his attention back to the pairs of people training in the ring, Tommy doubled back and followed Richard into the locker room.

As soon as he saw Tommy, Richard started backing down the aisle, flanked by lockers on one side and a bench on the other, hands held up in surrender. “Shit! Come _on_ , man!” he whined, exasperated. “What’s your problem?”

“Stay the fuck away from Lucy,” Tommy warned, diligently continuing for Richard but taking his time, enjoying the look of fear on the guy’s face. And here, in the locker room, to boot. Where Richard had told him about the agency in the first place.

“Lucy? Who the fuck is—” Richard looked confused for a full second before he understood what Tommy meant. “Oh, shit, you mean Ruby? Tommy, I didn’t know you had a thing. I was just saying hi. Come on, man,” he reasoned. Or tried to. “It was months ago. I was so coked out, bro! I barely remember it. ”

Tommy pushed thoughts of a zooted Richard pawing at Lucy’s body out of his mind, closing them behind a red curtain of anger.

“Tommy, she’s—”

“Shut the fuck up, you piece of shit,” Tommy interrupted, stepping over a bench and cornering Richard against a wall of lockers and a rack of towels.

“How am I a piece of shit? She’s an escort, man! You’re acting like she’s your girlfri—” Richard’s words cut off when Tommy jabbed him hard in the throat. It was a warning shot, just to shut him up—not to damage him.

“Fuck!” Richard wheezed, grabbing at his neck as if that was going to fix anything. He started begging. “I’m sorry. Whatever I did to piss you off, I’m sorry.”

Tommy shoved Richard hard against the towel rack, using both hands. It felt good but it not good enough. If he let loose on this guy, though, he would go to county and then the Marines would catch wind and then it would be a steep slide through shit until he was sent to Pendleton or Quantico. So, as angry as he was, he held back. Instead of breaking Richard’s jaw, Tommy growled, “Don’t talk about her.”

Don’t talk about her like that, is what he really meant. It was what she was, though. Wasn’t it? Richard looked at him, baffled, shaking his head in disbelief. Tommy could see that he thought he was crazy. An idiot. He fell in love with a hooker, like a dumbass. _You’re paying them to leave_ , Richard had said. Not to stay.

Throwing a punch felt pretty great. Less great was landing it—intentionally—on a locker door. The look of panic on Rich’s face was satisfying, though, so Tommy repeated the movement. Again. And again. By the time some guy pulled Tommy away from where he’d pinned Richard against the lockers with one forearm, Tommy’s right fist had dented the shit out of the metal door and he’d bled completely through the tape on his fingers.

So, that’s how Tommy got kicked out of Chicago’s best boxing gym, and how Richard lived to tell the tale—probably for years to come.

 

* * *

 

At home, half out of his mind with rage and already drunk after taking swigs from the pint of Jameson on his counter, Tommy came up with a plan. The whiskey chased a few darvocets, which helped with the pain in his shoulder but didn’t even touch the new rawness of his fucked-up right hand.

It wasn’t a good plan, but fuck it. Fuck all of it. What was he doing in Chicago, if a stupid boxing gym could blacklist him from amateur fights? Yet, that’s what they did. They kicked him out of the gym, took him off the roster of fighters, and effectively kicked him out of Chicago MMA in one fell swoop.

The new plan required money. All plans required money, and some plans cost more than others. Tommy figured his would cost a few hundred. The quickest way to get cash was to sell off some of his Oxy. He had way more pills than he had dollars, way more than he could reasonably take, especially if he ever wanted his dick to get hard again, so it was an easy solution. At $15 per, it took 20 Oxy for Tommy to get to $300, which he did easily outside the same corner store where he’d bought doughnuts and candy for him and Lucy. With the three rolled-up twenties he had in his coat pocket, that brought him to a respectable $360—enough to get shitface hammered and make a couple of phone calls.

He’d hire two girls from the agency. That’s what he’d do. See what he was missing out on. Two girls … and two pizzas. That was the plan he came up with. Maybe it was the liquor talking, and maybe it wasn’t a brilliant plan, but he felt like going for broke, anyway. Big splash and then get out of town.

Because: _Fuck Chicago_.

After he’d swallowed two shots and two beers at the shitty dive down the street, that was Tommy’s first call: Paige. At the agency. “Ask for Paige,” the card that Richard had put on his stuff said. That’s what he did. At the sound of her voice, Tommy wondered, again, if she was cute.

Paige remembered him right away, and was perky and pleasant right up until the point that Tommy asked for two girls. He whispered into the phone at the back of the dive he’d already spent $25 bucks in, Jack’s. “Uh, can I see Jen? … and, er, another girl.”

At that point, Paige paused and cautiously advised Tommy that they didn’t have anyone named Jen on their list.

“Oh, shit, I don’t know her other name—her escort name,” Tommy mumbled into the phone.

“Sorry, Tommy,” Paige said gently. “But, you sound, um, _altered_ —and we don’t like to send anyone out on a call when a client’s feeling under the weather.”

Tommy started to protest, but realized he probably wasn’t helping his case by arguing. As he stuttered an apology and tried to sound sober—sober enough to hire escorts, if that was a thing—there was an exchange of words on the other end of the phone. Tommy held his battered hand over his right ear and closed his eyes, trying to make out what was being said. He thought he heard his name in there.

“And ... also—Tommy, sorry,” Paige continued, “I was just told that there’s a conflict of interests, maybe? One of our girls who is on hiatus because of—”

“Who? Lucy? She told you about me?” Tommy blurted the words into the pay phone, slumping against the machine to rest his forehead against the cold grime of the metal front of the throwback phone.

“ _Ruby_ ,” Paige corrected, her voice softening. “And yes, she did. I’m going to have to let you go, Tommy. I’m getting another call.”

“What did she—” Tommy started to ask, turning his head to find a cooler spot on the metal front of the phone. But the other end of the line went dead before he could find out what Lucy said about him.

Once again, but now in a shit mood, Tommy found himself baffled by the lack of a middle ground as far as the demographics at Jack’s. He swayed slightly as he surveyed the room: a couple of decrepit old men playing cribbage at the short end of the bar, a group of college kids at the pool table, three girls in a booth hooting and hollering about something they were looking at on a cell phone, another young guy holding court on Ms Pac-Man with a sandwich bag of quarters at the ready. Nothing was playing on the jukebox probably because the kids didn’t know how to work it and the old fogies were sick of hearing the same ol’ Eagles album over and over. Dive bars weren’t what they used to be.

This time, however, Tommy was “altered” enough to bring it up to the authentically crusty old bartender.

“Hey, what’s up with this place, man?” Tommy twisted back around to the bar to ask, sounding more confrontational than sympathetic. He pushed his empties across the wet bar top and added sourly, “I’ll take another set of these, when you can.”

The bartender looked up from whatever he was reading—sports pages, it looked like—and nodded at the request, not answering Tommy’s question.

“Where are all the normal people?” he asked, rephrasing it slightly in an attempt to not cause offense.

The bartender shrugged, uninterested. He poured another Bud draft and slid it to Tommy and then turned his back to the bar in order to reach for a fresh bottle of whiskey. Tommy was thinking about how he’d make a dent in that freshie too, when he became aware that there was someone next to his arm. A girl, one of the three in the booth who’d been giggling over some video on their phone. She was struggling clumsily to get on top of the stool next to Tommy.

“Need help?” Tommy mumbled sourly, half amused and half annoyed that with all this empty space at the bar, this one had to be all up in his shit.

“Excuse _me_ ,” the girl snapped back, salty. She swiped her messy blond hair out of her eyes and childishly sneered at him.

“Yeah, excuse you.” Tommy saw now that she was drunk as hell, which explained why she wasn’t physically capable of sitting on a stool like a regular person. Leaning away from her, he lasciviously checked the girl out as she tried to get the bartender’s attention with another “excuse me” in a much more pleasant manner.

She was a soft, squishy thing—all tits and ass and shiny pink lipstick, poured into a dress at the limit of its stretch capability. The tag was hanging out of her dress and Tommy stifled a smile by chewing on his bottom lip. What a hot mess.

“Um, excuse me? Sir? Do you have an iPhone cord back there?” she asked, too loud and too bossy. Tommy took a drink of his beer, giving her profile the side-eye. She was, unfortunately, kind of sexy—in a train wreck sort of way? Not hot by any stretch of the imagination, but ballsy. Tommy was simultaneously repelled and attracted to her. Had to be the whiskey, because she was not really his thing. Lucy, though … she was much more his style.

_Fuckin’ … Lucy._

“See? That’s what I mean,” Tommy said to the bartender, shrugging his head in her direction.

“ _What’s_ what you mean?” she snarled, turning to look at Tommy.

Her eyes flickered from his face to the bandaged hand holding his beer, and finally to his coat, which he’d kept on partly out of habit and partly out of drunk obliviousness. He didn’t realize how hot it was in Jack’s. He was actually goddamned sweating.

He set his beer down and pulled himself free of both his sweatshirt and coat at one time, shaking the heavy fabric a couple of times. The jingle of quarters in his pocket reminded him of his failed attempt of getting laid and he grimaced as he hung his clothes on a hook under the bar. He must have looked a little different without all those layers on, because he turned just in time to see the girl gawking at him briefly.

“You’re asking the owner of a dive bar—” Tommy started to say. He was bored and drunk, and fully prepared to put this kid on blast. It had been at least two-three hours since he’d been a dick to someone who didn’t really deserve it, so why not?

“I’m not the owner,” the bartender interrupted curtly, completely fucking up Tommy’s would-be lecture. He slid Tommy his shot and explained, “It’s my brother’s bar.”

With a sigh, the bartender looked at the girl with tired resignation. “What do you need, sweetheart?”

She looked at Tommy, smug as shit, and then immediately turned the charm on for the old man. Tommy watched in embarrassed awe as she cooed, “I was just wondering if maybe you had a lightning cord back there that I could plug my phone into?”

The bartender frowned and shook his head in apology. “Sorry. Don’t even know what that is.”

“Sucks for you,” Tommy offered her, cheekily adding a shrug. “You might have to actually hang out with your friends.”

She clapped back immediately: “Says the guy getting shitfaced at the bar by himself, with no friends.”

She had a point. Dismissing her jab with a snort, Tommy took a swig of his beer and twisted around to look at the table where her friends were sitting. He caught them as they rapidly looked away from where he and their friend were positioned at the bar. Aha. Spies.

“Buy me a drink,” the girl said sharply. Her big ass was finally situated on the barstool and she nudged his arm with hers. “What’d you do to your hand?”

“Buy your own drink,” Tommy answered, “and none of your business.”

The girl harrumphed and leaned on the bar with one elbow to look at Tommy. She was taking the bait. Why do girls always take the bait? She narrowed her eyes and looked him over, finally asking: “Why are you such a dick? I could be a really nice girl and you’d—”

“You’re not,” Tommy interrupted. He glanced at her briefly, just long enough to make full eye contact, before looking up at the TV with feigned boredom. “Nice girls don’t tell a guy sitting by himself at a bar to buy them a drink.”

She looked genuinely insulted by that for a moment and then cracked a smile. “You’re not wrong. What’s your name?”

He set his beer down and slowly cocked his head to the side until he was flat-out scrutinizing her through half-lidded eyes. “Tommy,” he replied, after a few beats. He took another drink of his beer and looked away from her again, turning his attention to anything else.

“Aren’t you going to ask my name?” she challenged him, as if he’d broken some kind of code of conduct.

“Nope,” Tommy answered, itching his ear and gesturing to the bartender. When he came over, he ordered another shot of Jameson.

“Wow—buying yourself another drink but not me? So rude,” she snorted. She was off balance, and he liked it that way. “Why don’t you want to know my name?”

Tommy shrugged. “Because I’m not trying to fuck you.”

The quickness of his reply must have startled her, because she gasped lightly and  leaned toward him ever so slightly. She whispered, “Pardon me? Did you just say that you don’t wanna _fuck me_? I wasn’t—”

“Didn’t say that,” he interjected, keeping his voice low so she’d hear it but the bartender wouldn’t. “I said I’m not _trying_ to fuck you. Still gonna happen, though.”

When the shot arrived, her mouth was still hanging open from his last comment. Tommy slid the whiskey toward her. “There’s your drink.”

Maybe those shitheads at the gym were right. Maybe he could have just gone out to a bar and picked up some drunk chick in the first place. Saved himself some money and a lot of trouble. He didn’t have to put forth real effort, or select a girl from a website, or be screened or even tell anyone his first name. Here, he’d lazily launched a drunken, sloppy pass at this girl and she caught it with gusto. For free. Maybe it wasn’t two escorts and two pizzas, but it was free. And maybe she would be enough to take his mind off Lucy for a few minutes.

Those thoughts, though: Lucy, spreading herself open at his request that first night, when she was still technically Ruby. Lucy, holding his head to her breast, so close he could hear her heart. Lucy, smelling like coconut shampoo. That big smile, like the Cheshire Cat.

After a long pause, in which the girl was probably trying to figure out what his game was, and whether or not she liked it, she shuddered slightly and licked her lips. She accepted the offering of Jameson, keeping her eyes on Tommy as she drank it—as though he couldn’t be trusted.

It wasn’t much better at his place, as she marched through the gloomy interior as if she expected there to be a hidden camera, or a torture chamber. Tommy poured a nip of whiskey into a plastic cup for her and offered it up on her next pass by him. She wrinkled her nose as she shrugged out of her coat, refusing it.

“What—now that it’s free, you don’t want it?” he scoffed.

With a frown, she blurted, “Hey—my name’s Hayley. Just so you know.” She pushed his hand holding the cup back in his direction, swaying drunkenly until she had to steady herself against the countertop. “What are you trying to do, Thomas—get me drunk?”

Tommy snorted derisively in response. One, nobody called him Thomas, ever. Not even his mom. And two, clearly, the “get me drunk” ship had already sailed, as she was drunk as hell and knew it.

He was also drunk as hell and starting to miss details. Like her name, for instance. She’d just said it. Was it Holly? Hayley? H-something. Didn’t matter.

She glared at him with a mixture of defiance and annoyance, and looked him over. “Take your coat off. I like you better with your coat off.”

“Go shut the door, and I will. You left it open, like an asshole,” Tommy muttered, setting down the cup of whiskey.

“You left it open! Where’s your accent from, anyway? You actually _from_ Chicago?” she asked, faux suspicious, but stumbling to the door obediently to close it anyway. He watched her as she went, woozily enjoying the sight of her too-tight dress riding up in the back to expose a substantial part of her thigh and a wedge of her asscheek.

“Nah.” He left it at that, focusing his gaze on her thick thighs as she walked. Fuck. Even taking his coat off was a challenge. How was he going to manage actually having sex with this girl?

“What, like New York or something? Jersey?”

“Something like that,” he mumbled, finally unzipping his coat and stripping both it and his sweatshirt off. When he was down to his T-shirt, he accidentally made eye contact with Hayley and she motioned with her hand for him to keep going.

“Take off your shirt. I’ll take off my dress,” Hayley slurred her offer, sloppy and coy. “And, take off your pants … and I’ll take off my panties.”

Tommy considered that exchange and proposed his own: “OK. How about … you take off everything and I let you suck my dick?”

Hayley squinted at him, half-smiling. With mock outrage, she hissed, “ _Let_ me? Why are you so fucking mean?”

“I don’t know,” Tommy admitted, thumbs already poised at the waistband of his pants. He met her eyes again—all four of them. No, eight. He was hammered. Blearily, he fired back the best he could, “Why d’you like it so much?”

Because she _did_ like it. Bafflingly. She couldn’t wait to get her mouth on him, it seemed, and barely made it to the couch before she was dropping to her knees and fumbling for his half-hard cock. When she wrapped her lips around it, Tommy again thought about Lucy. He closed his eyes, remembering how she’d gotten him hard even when he thought it was a lost cause. He thought about lost causes, of which he probably was one, and then he didn’t think about anything at all.

 

* * *

 

Tommy woke with a jolt after hearing his own snore and came to on his own couch, groggy and shivering under the blanket from his bed. He was completely naked, he discovered, as he shifted stiffly on the cushion and ran his hand over his torso. Naked, except for a condom that was stuck to his skin, between his thigh and the couch cushion. Gross.

“The fuck?” he asked no one, feeling like complete shit as he peeled the (thankfully?) empty rubber away from his skin and threw it on the coffee table. He thought he was alone, but when his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he realized there was someone curled up on the other end of the couch, underneath his sweatshirt.

Oh god, he thought, struggling to remember her name. Hayley? Holly? She talked … a lot. That much, he could remember. And the condom—that was a point of contention as he was having a hard time getting hard through several layers of drugs and alcohol.

The sweatshirt-covered lump moved with a muffled grumble and her head emerged. Filled with dread about what to say to the girl, to …  pretty sure it was Hayley, he steeled himself against what was probably going to be a massively uncomfortable interaction. He suddenly recalled a snippet of their fumbling, wasted interaction—she probably should have just fucked off after he told her that he wasn’t at all into her request of choking her out when she came. That seemed like a really bad idea, with his anger issues. She didn’t fuck off, though, even when he refused, because he was already inside of her, senselessly pursuing an orgasm that he wasn’t sure would happen. Had he come? He couldn’t recall but the empty condom indicated … probably not. Tommy glanced awkwardly at the shadowed face peeking out from under the hood of his heavy sweatshirt.

But that indistinct profile didn’t belong to the girl he’d brought home from the bar. It was Lucy’s face.  

“Lucy?” He asked, startled and in almost total disbelief. Was he dreaming? “How did you—”

“Mmpf. _Tu puerta estaba abierto_ ,” she grumbled, stretching her arm out. “ _Que hora_?”

“Open?” Hadn’t he told Hayley to shut the door? She must’ve left it open when she took off. He twisted on the couch to try to make out the clock on the stove. “It’s … shit, it’s almost 6.”

Lucy was sleeping in her clothes and coat, as well as in Tommy’s watch cap, plus she was using his sweatshirt as a blanket. He looked her over while changing position on the couch, until he was completely slouched and huddled under the blanket from the neck down. He became aware that his head was pounding in increasingly punishing throbs, so he closed his eyes and let his head fall back on the back of the couch.

“Lucy, I—”

“Who was that girl?”

Tommy opened his eyes but didn’t respond. How dumb could he play here? Silence, as always, was the best option.

“I came over here to talk and there was some girl here and I was just wondering who she was.” Lucy’s voice was quiet, even. She didn’t sound angry so much as she sounded hurt.

Tommy didn’t know how to answer that at all.

“I walked in on you guys,” Lucy added, almost apologetically. “I mean, sort of. The door was open and I could hear you guys talking when I was coming up the stairs. I thought you were … _yo no sé—_ fighting? At first?” She paused and sounded like she was on the verge of laughing and crying. She finished, “But then I came around the corner and … yeah.”

“Lucy, I don’t remember—”

“Oh, you don’t? OK. Well, you were fucking,” Lucy interrupted flatly, informing him in a way designed to cause both of them pain. “You were sitting right there, in that spot, and she was bouncing on your dick with her tits all out. You were, like, calling her names?”

“I—was?” Tommy wished the couch could swallow him up. He didn’t remember any name-calling, but if their interaction at the bar was any indication of how and where things were headed, he imagined that they got pretty nasty.

“I heard you call her your ‘dirty little whore,’” Lucy recited it back to him, as if it was the cruelest insult she’d ever heard. Of course it would sound like that to her, in that context. Or any other. Tommy stayed silent. “She wasn’t that little, though, really,” she sniped, catty and hurt. Her eyes were shimmery in the half-light. “How much did she charge you?”

Tommy swallowed hard and sat up on the couch, gathering the blanket around his hips so he could stand up. “I didn’t—”

“No, really—how much?”

“Lucy, she was just some girl I met at Jack’s,” Tommy explained. He stood up with a groan, the combination of his headache and his backache almost sending him reeling. Fuckin’ boilermakers. Fuckin’ busted-ass couch. When he was fully up, his lower body wrapped in the blanket, he started looking around for his clothes.

“Oh, OK, I get it—just some girl you hit it off with?” Lucy sat up, bracing her elbows against the arm of couch. She didn’t look jealous, exactly. She looked like she wanted an explanation. “Anyway, I told her to go home and she said she wanted to fight me.”

His sweats in hand, Tommy stopped to raise an eyebrow at Lucy. Incredulous, he asked, “She wanted to fight you?”

Then a memory washed over him. Cloudy, but there: Lucy standing over them on the couch. Hayley climbing off of his lap, with her hands on his shoulders, looking for her dress because she wasn’t going to fight some other bitch without her clothes on.

“Go home, honey,” Lucy instructed the other girl, sounding surprisingly undisturbed and patient. Like this was all shit she’d seen before. Just sad. Not angry. “This isn’t about you.”

“Fuck you, skank bitch—I’m not leaving. YOU leave,” Hayley snarled at Lucy, ready to go to war.

Lucy quietly saying, “Tommy.” Fixing him with a pointed look. All the wind had been knocked out of him, being caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar. He couldn’t have felt shittier.

Tommy vaguely recalled struggling to gesture at the door. Telling her to get out. Both girls looking at him in confusion. Gesturing at Hayley with his head, and mumbling, “Get out of here.”

He didn’t remember anything after that.

“She left, and you and me had a talk— _te acuerdas_?”

Tommy shook his head. He didn’t remember that, no.

“It was such a good talk!” Lucy insisted. “But then you passed out, so … I guess it wasn’t that good. You were so out of it, Tommy. I was going to drag you to bed ... but you’re really heavy.”

He pulled on his sweats and quickly snatched the unfurled condom off the coffee table, hiding it in the palm of his good hand. Swirling down the drain of his own internal shame spiral, Tommy reached for his oversized black hoodie and yanked it over his head.

Clothed, finally, and feeling slightly less exposed, he lurched toward the kitchen to get rid of the prophylactic evidence as fast as possible. “I’m—I don’t remember the talk, Lucy.”

“No? Well, it was good, Tommy.”

“What was it about?” he asked, trying to keep the hope out of his voice, as well as the fear. What had he told her? What if he got all confessional and told her everything?

He picked up the still-warm blanket and tenderly handed it to Lucy, suddenly nostalgic for her calling him “baby” instead of Tommy. She quickly accepted it without a word and wrapped it around her legs, which were coiled under her on the couch. Tommy stood at the kitchen counter, leaning on it with his forearms while waiting for her response.

“It was about liking, like ... each other. And how mad I was about you trying to hire two escorts, like you were some kind of player,” Lucy admitted. He looked up at her sharply. How the hell did she know that?

“I told you that?” Tommy asked, mortified. Stupid drunk assholes making stupid drunk asshole choices. And then announcing them to the worst possible person.

Lucy shook her head. “No, it was Patty—uh, Paige. My boss at the agency? She told me. She knew I’d want to check on you, so I did.”

Tommy nodded minutely, flinching at even the subtle movement. His head was killing him. He patted his sweatshirt front, looking for his bottle of percocet. Not there. He scanned the counter in his kitchen but didn’t see it. Fuck—had he lost it on the way home from the bar? He’d sold all that Oxy, so now he was low on pills. And where was that $300?

Lucy watched him fumbling around and sighed, “But I guess you were doing just fine on your own.”

“I don’t know,” he finally confirmed, out of a general sense of guilt. “Just a bad night.”

“OK, or …” Lucy suggested, “maybe you were mad at me and pulled some stupid shit to get back at me?”

“Mad? At you? Why would I be mad at you, Lucy?” Tommy asked, folding his arms across his chest and tucking his hands into his armpits. He could feel the panic rising up through his guts and into his chest. Great timing for a panic attack. He had to find some pills. There was a bottle of percs in the bathroom, he thought suddenly, glancing toward the door. But then, another thought broke through his pressing and intensifying need for something to calm his nerves, and he added, “What would I want to get back at you for?”

“Because you don’t like what I do for work? So you tried to fuck my friend to hurt me? Patty told me you asked for Jen. She doesn’t even work there anymore, Tommy, so—” Lucy looked away and started pulling at a loose thread on the blanket as Tommy searched his mind for something to say. He had no rebuttal. Lucy mumbled, “If you wanted a threesome, I could have ...”

“I didn’t want a threesome,” Tommy snapped. Definitely not like that. Not with someone he felt something for. Not with Lucy.

“What’d you want then? To be like Richard? Two girls at once?”

“Don’t compare me to him.”

“Why not? Why wouldn’t I?” Lucy blustered. She moved until she was sitting up straight, and the sunrise, just peeking through the blinds on the windows, was casting dirty orange streaks across her body and face. “What makes you different from that guy, doing stuff like that?”

“Stuff? Like?”

“Tommy, shut up. I’m serious—what do you think makes you different than Richard? You both hired me—so what? He doesn’t have a problem with what I do. He wanted a thing, he asked for a thing, the thing happened, and everyone moved on … except you.”

Tommy looked down at his bare feet, his breath rate increasing as panic started to choke his airways. His palms were beginning to sweat. What the fuck was happening to him?

“You can’t handle what I do for work, and that’s not going to work for me,” Lucy said. “That’s why we can’t be together. Even though I like you … like, _so much_.”

“Lucy …” he started. He didn’t know how to complete that sentence, though. Finishing conversations without a TKO being involved were not Tommy’s strong suit. And right then, at that moment, he didn’t feel angry at all. He just felt shitty.

She was right. He knew she was right. She definitely knew she was right.

“You need someone to love you really hard,” Lucy said, her voice cracking as she held back a sob. When she continued, her voice wavered at first, but then grew stronger: “And I want to do that for you, to help you—but I can’t love you, not like you need, if you won’t accept what I do for work. And, for right now, this is what I’m doing. Earning as much money as I can.”

“Hey, I don’t need your _help_ ,” Tommy barked, the panic finally reaching his throat and forcing the words out. He was supposed to help _her_. To save her. To help Pilar, too. Save Pilar. And the kids. And maybe save, retroactively and by proxy, Manny in some way.

“Baby, you wake up _crying_ in the middle of the night,” Lucy stated, shaking her head sadly at him. Tommy’s shoulders slumped at her use of “baby.” The endearment somehow made it worse, more painful. Maybe it _was_ what she called all her clients when she told them they were fucked in the head.

She went on: “And not just that one time, either—with the closet. Sometimes you don’t even wake up when it happens. I might be an escort with no credit, but you’re the one with real shit going on that you need help with.”

Tommy kept his mouth closed, grimacing as he rocked forward and back from his heels to toes. They didn’t say anything, either of them, for a bit. He didn’t want to yell or fight or argue. He didn’t know what he wanted. He wanted, honestly, to be dead. Dead like everyone else who’d been important to him.

“I don’t know what to do,” Tommy admitted, suddenly feeling empty and meek after what felt like a half an hour of blistering silence. Nobody had called him on his shit like that. Not since Manny, and that was very different shit, and a long time ago. “Lucy, I care about you. But I don’t know what to do.”

Lucy stared at him for a long time. Eventually, she sighed, and threw off the blanket to untangle herself from the couch.

“How about …” she said, gingerly standing upright and taking a step in his direction. She pulled his hat off her head and tossed it on the coffee table. Her voice was so soothing to him; at least, when she wasn’t telling him what a fucking mess he was. “Hmm. How about we take a shower, lay down, and I rub your back _un poco_?”

Tommy almost sobbed in relief, but successfully held it in. It sounded unbelievably good. Especially in his hungover state, Tommy couldn’t imagine anything sounding better.

Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and exhaled it, trying to will his heart and respiratory rates down. When he opened his eyes, Lucy was right in front of him, reaching up to encircle his neck with her arms. He uncrossed his own, partly so she could get in closer to him and partly so he could cup her hips in his hands and go in for a kiss on the lips. It hadn’t even been 24 hours and he already deeply missed kissing her. How many more chances would he get?

It was almost over, whatever this was. So, not many, he suspected.

Lucy abruptly pulled away and waved her hand in front of Tommy’s confused face. “Oh, uh-uh. Not yet, baby. Your breath is … very bad.”


	6. Round 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Final round: Tommy tries to figure out what happens next.
> 
> CW: sex, language, small amounts of untranslated Spanish

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are a fluent Spanish speaker, specifically if you speak Mexican Spanish or Puerto Rican Spanish, please feel free to hand me my ass on a plate for fucking up colloquialisms! I welcome any and all corrections from a native speaker.

Tommy showered, hoping that Lucy would, by some miracle, make good on her offer to shower with him. Then, maybe that would turn into them kissing, and the kissing would turn into getting handsy with each other, and then that would turn into sex and then everything could go back to how it was before. But she hadn’t appeared in the steamy bathroom. And nothing had gone back to how it was.

He brushed his teeth—used mouthwash, even. But still no Lucy in the bathroom. Whatever. Maybe she was just being nice when she’d said that they should shower and she’d rub his back. Sex was probably way out of the question, and he wasn’t sure he even had it in him to get it up, anyway. He felt like reheated shit — couldn’t hardly think — so he took two percocets with a handful of cold water from the sink tap and avoided looking in the mirror.

Wrapping a threadbare, secondhand towel around his hips, he quietly went into the bedroom to find she’d fallen back asleep, curled up on his bed, still wearing his sweatshirt. He abandoned the wet towel on the floor and crawled into his tiny bed still damp, moving around her small, still form as carefully as possible so she could sleep.

He wasn’t able to rest. Exhausted and hungover as hell, his mind was a whirling mess of rehashing the night before, over and over. He had to grit his teeth against the onslaught of guilt and shame. He just had to fend off a panic attack long enough for the pills to kick in.

Seriously, though: How many ways he could fuck something up in one go?   

Further, where were the pills he carried with him everywhere? And that $300 — had he spent it? Dropped it? If that girl Hayley had rolled him, he definitely deserved it. Fuck, _Hayley_. How did that happen? It all seemed like a shitty dream, a porno nightmare. Would she really have fought Lucy? Lucy could probably take the other girl in a fight, he thought. She was little but strong as fuck. Quick. Also, would she even have fought? He’d never had a girl fight for him — or about him, as far as he knew. That scenario kinda made his dick hard, he realized with not a small amount of shame.

This is why Tommy needed his pills: too many thoughts, and they were all the wrong ones.

“I gotta get out of Chicago,” Tommy murmured into Lucy’s hair. It was a brief thought that passed through his mind, but it came right out of his mouth before he could stop it.

What did it even matter, where he went? Why would she care? He wasn’t anybody to Lucy, especially after the night before. _I can’t love you_ , she’d said. _We can’t be together_. And it was all because she wouldn’t stop being an escort. No, scratch that. It was all because he couldn’t accept that she was an escort. Everything would be fine if he’d just stop being a dick and accept it. Everything would be easy.

Either that … or if she stopped being an escort.

But then the phrase about getting out of town was out of him and he couldn’t take it back. It had only just occurred to him, yet there he went, telling Lucy, the only person in Chicago who would probably notice.

He didn’t know if she was even awake yet. He suspected she was, as Lucy was curled over and around him, one thigh thrown over his in a way that wouldn’t be real conducive to sleeping. But she hadn’t moved in minutes.

“Where will you go?” she murmured, her voice a quiet mumble against his chest. She sounded slightly sad, and nestled her face closer to him.

He shouldn’t have said anything. Tommy swallowed down the lump in his throat and said, “I don’t know. But I can’t stay here. I kinda ...”

“Fucked yourself over?” Lucy finished for him. She stretched her arm out and laid it across his chest, her hand coming to rest where his shoulder met his neck. Her thumb lightly rubbed against his skin, and he knew she wasn’t trying to hurt him by saying as much. She was right.

“Mm. Yeah.” Tommy agreed. “Let’s pretend last night never happened.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she mumbled, teasing without teeth. Tommy guessed she didn’t want to talk about it, either, because she changed the subject immediately. “Oh, hey, I almost forgot to tell you — I found a bunch of twenties on the landing outside.  _Es tuyo?_ ”

He groaned. Whatever was left of that $300 must have fallen out when he was fumbling for his keys, trying to get Hayley into his apartment so he could pass out during sex. Idiot. Fucking dirtbag. “Shit. Yeah, that’s mine.” However, on the brighter side, he hadn’t been rolled by a girl he brought home from Jack’s, like he absolutely thought he had. Grateful, he thanked her.

He also thought about asking Lucy if she saw a bottle of pills out there, too, but that was showing his hand a bit too much.

The tender way Lucy was touching him made it easier to push the shame out of his mind. She was being so soft with him, so gentle. Her affection made his heart ache even at the same time it made his cock twitch and thicken. How the hell was he horny, after all of this? What was it about this girl that made him so crazy? She wasn’t even naked and he was getting turned on.

With the arm that wasn’t holding her close to his side, he snaked his hand under Lucy’s bent knee to adjust the position of her leg across him. He slid it down a bit until the head of his stiffening dick was just grazing the fabric of her leggings behind her knee.

“What about New York?”

Lucy’s fingers paused briefly while stroking his neck. She took a full breath and then resumed, asking, “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. What if I went and got things going — for us? Like, what if I set it up so you have somewhere to go when you’re ready?”

Lucy raised her head to look at him. Her expression was inscrutable. “Wait, _como_? You mean, you go to New York? Move in together?”

Tommy’s heartbeat flickered, like a fluorescent light on the fritz. Either it was nerves, or his heart wasn’t sure where it should be pumping the blood: his dick or his brain. He shrugged his shoulder noncommittally in response, uncertain of her reaction. If she laughed at him, he didn’t even know what he’d do. Lose it, probably. Everything felt too close to the surface.

Her eyes searched his face, as if she wasn’t sure if he meant it. “Tommy ... are you fucking with me? _No me jodas._ ”

Here was his chance. He could blow it off like it was just a joke, like he hadn’t really meant it. It was a crazy thought, anyway. He didn’t even like New York — bunch of Giants-loving jackasses.

But the idea of him and Lucy there, like … a normal couple, starting fresh, starting over. Her coming home from her classes; him bringing home pizza. Maybe they’d get a dog. Start a family, eventually. He’d get a decent under-the-table job and start sending real money to Pilar every month, do his part to help Manny’s family like he swore he would. He could do it, all of it.

He felt like he was on the edge of something, and the notion of them being together in a new place felt good to him. Felt right.

“I’m not joking,” Tommy assured her. He was growing more confident as their prospective life played out in his mind’s eye. “Nothing’s stopping us.”

Lucy’s eyes continued to study his face, waiting for him to crack a smile, or a joke, maybe. Her mind was probably racing too. This, after a bad night, after a weird morning, after all the shit he’d already put her through. No wonder she was confused. Eventually, their eyes met and her mouth spread into a slow, closed smile.

“I’ll think about it,” she whispered. “It could be fun. You could be my old man. You gotta get a phone though, because I’m not about to wonder where you are all the time, like now.”

It was like he’d asked her to marry him, or something. He felt legitimately nervous, but her lack of refusal was like a balm against his frayed nerves.

“Like what? You’d go out there and find a place?”

He nodded, encouragingly.

“Tommy, I’m still pissed at you about last night. I was trying to be cool about it, but … it sucked.”

“You should be,” Tommy agreed with a sigh. “It was stupid. I’m an idiot.”

“Yeah, you are,” Lucy whispered. “ _Pero eres MI idiota_.”

He nodded, pulling her closer and nuzzling her hair with his nose.

“Lucy,” he murmured, “I wanna be with you. Do you—”

When Lucy craned her face up, interrupting him, Tommy quickly bent his neck to meet the kiss he’d been waiting for, the one he’d wanted all morning. Maybe she meant it to be a chaste kiss, just a little one to seal the deal, but Tommy escalated it at the earliest opportunity. He shifted until he had both of his arms tightly around her, pulling her up into a deep kiss. She moaned into his mouth and he closed his eyes, moving her torso so it was on him and slyly snaking his hands up under the baggy sweatshirt she was swathed in.

Tommy, pulling his mouth off of hers reluctantly, instructed, “Take this thing off.”

Lucy grumbled, dipping her head back down to lick and suck at his lower lip, trying to get back into the kiss as he lifted the hem of his hoodie up. He returned the kiss but didn’t stop trying to get her undressed. After several moments, she relented and let him drag the sweatshirt off.

“Are you sure, baby?” she whispered, leaning one elbow on his sternum so he could free her other arm of the fabric.

“About …?”

She changed her mind, though, and shook her head. “Huh? Never mind.”

Tommy looked at her, confused, and then started working on taking off the rest of her clothes.

“Tommy, no, wait,” Lucy reconsidered yet again, just as he was undoing the. “Last night was a lot. I wanna get with you right now, but I just want to make sure you’re … like, not just trying to make me feel better.”

Without hesitation, his voice more certain than his mind, he said, “Lucy, I just said I want to be with you.”

It felt more and more true, each time he said it. He did want Lucy, that was undeniable. He didn’t want the way she made him feel to end. So, if the way to feeling that way for as long as possible was by positioning himself in her life’s path, then that’s what he was going to do. Lucy wanted NYC, he’d go to NYC. She wanted fashion school and maybe NY-style pizza — fine. He could do that.

He gently pulled her hand toward his cock, which was more than respectably hard for her now. Hangover be damned. His voice went raspy when her fingers made contact with it, and he said, “See how much I want you?”

“Mm, _si, lo veo_. _Puedo sentirlo,_  too, Tommy,” Lucy laughed, and it seemed to him like any lingering doubts his intentions she might have drained from her expression. Either that, or she wanted him as much as he wanted her. Tommy liked imagining that was the case. She saw him at his worst, passed out and fucked up on a ragged old couch, but she still wanted him. Still looked at him like he was worth wasting her time with.

Lucy moved her hand over his skin, lightly stroking his cock as she positioned herself. She never took her hand off him, except when it came time to extricate herself fully from her clothes. Even then, she barely broke eye contact with him.

She was so beautiful, Tommy could hardly believe she was real. Her hair was gloriously chaotic, hanging down her back in thick waves and jumbled curls. He toyed with the ends of it as she wiggled out of the rest of her clothes. When she was finally naked, he left her hair alone and gingerly reached out to cup her breasts in his hands, rubbing his thumbs over her small, firm nipples.

“You like the way I touch you?” she whispered, squeezing his rigid flesh lightly.

“Oh yeah,” he exhaled, not realizing he’d been holding his breath. He raised his hips slightly into the air, straining to get closer to her.

“Better than that other girl?” Lucy asked quickly, looking away. Almost embarrassed, she added, “I tried to be cool when I saw you with her, but — _esto es mio._ OK?”

Tommy tensed up a bit, bewildered, as she tightened her grip on his cock, her strokes becoming rougher. That whole mess with whatsername really shook her up. He stared up at Lucy, guilt-ridden, and nodded, gasping as she ran her thumbnail under the head of his dick. Yes, his dick was hers.

In her hands, he would pretty much agree to anything, but he’d especially agree to that. She wanted him as much as he wanted her.

“Fuck,” he panted, his face tightening into a grimace as she jerked him faster. He bit out the words, “Lucy, yeah _._ Just ... just me, too. From now on. OK?”

Lucy regarded him, a dark expression in her eyes, like she was thinking. Weighing her options. Eventually, she wet her lips and bent over him to lick at a small bead of precome that was glistening at the end of his dick. Tommy shivered as his stomach tied into knots, anxiously waiting for her to respond. After a few moments, she agreed, her stony expression softening into a small smile. “OK, baby. Just you.”

Tommy felt a wave of relief as what that meant settled in. She wasn’t going to see other guys anymore, then. Not for fun or for money. She’d stop being an escort and he’d stop having to be an asshole about it. Everything really was going to work out.

Lucy bent over him and skillfully sucked his cock until he was painfully hard and almost short of breath. He had to interrupt it or it would be over too soon. He had to get at her. Nothing — not even the effects of the pills kicking in, or the residual nausea and headache from his big, stupid night — would keep his dick from staying hard this time.

“Get up here,” Tommy growled, desperate for something else to concentrate on to keep himself from blowing his load too fast. Lucy was way too good at giving him head. It’s like he had no control over his body reacting to her the way it did. It was the first time he’d felt good — like that, like _in_ his body — in god knew how long, and he wanted to keep that feeling for as long as he could.

Tommy manhandled her until she was facing away from him and kneeling above him with her wet, slippery center within tongue’s reach. With a groan as Lucy settled on him, her mouth hot and wet around his cock again, he closed his eyes and dug in. Hooking his arms under her thighs, he folded his hands atop the small of her back, spreading her thighs apart with his arms and pulling him down onto his mouth. He wanted to die like this, smothered and overwhelmed by her taste, her smells and sounds. Tommy doggedly went at her pussy, licking and sucking at the soft skin of her until she was shaking and moaning with his cock still filling her mouth.

Before she could fully regain control of her body, he heaved Lucy off of his face in one movement, curling her full body weight down until she was straddling his hips.

“Fuck yes, baby — _quiero tu verga_ ,” she panted, scrambling to get herself situated on him. The guilt of having had his dick in someone else just hours before shot through Tommy’s mind like a .50-cal bullet, but he dismissed it as soon as he could. There was nothing he couldn’t ignore, if he set his mind to it. Another Riordan-Conlon family trait.

Lucy sank onto him with a moan, keeping her back to him. He could feel her body stretching to accommodate his thickness, and once he was fully ensheathed inside of her, she started to pulse up and down. Lucy rode him with gathering intensity, bracing her hands against his thighs. The view was better than porn could ever hope to be: her petite, round ass bouncing against his stomach, her dark hair fanning against the tan skin of her back, the tattooed roses on her left shoulder blade flexing across her skin. Tommy watched the slight knobs of her spine as he kneaded the soft flesh of her backside. Working with her gait to pull her down onto him harder, always harder, he dug his thumbs into the meaty part of her hips so hard that they left marks.

Lucy inhaled sharply and let go of his thighs in favor of steadying herself by grasping his hands on her hips. As she bounced, she muttered that she wanted it harder: “ _Mas duro! Cojeme mas duro,_ Tommy.”

Definitely the best thing that had ever happened to him, he thought. He didn’t deserve Lucy, not after what he’d done, and yet there she was, fucking him hard, warning him that she was about to come all over his cock.

The sound of their skin slapping together combined with their labored breathing was totally hypnotic, and Tommy could feel himself slipping into an almost liminal state as he lost himself in the act of fucking. He might be an idiot, but he was Lucy’s idiot, and that was fine, as long as they could stay lost like this for a little longer.

 

Lucy wouldn’t sleep at his place again. She wanted to, she said, but she had a bunch of shit she had to take care of, considering she hadn’t expected to stay over the night before. Tommy was disappointed, but what could he do?

“Let’s go out or something? Have dinner somewhere,” he offered, a last-ditch effort. Tommy was in his tiny kitchen, throwing out empties and dumping out half-glasses of water, in an attempt to seem like less of a mess and more like someone a girl might want to live with. Say, in New York.

“I can’t, Tommy,” Lucy said, sounding sorry about it. “I promised my cousin I’d make dinner for everybody tonight.” She sat on the arm of the couch while she pulled her shoes on. After she finished, she slinked behind the counter to embrace him from behind while he stood at the sink. She tucked her hands just inside the waistband of his sweats, pressing her face against the skin of his shirtless back. Hope in her voice, she asked, “Unless maybe you want to come over and have dinner with my family?”

Tommy turned the tap on and waited for the water to heat up. Closing his eyes to properly enjoy all the warmth from Lucy’s hug, he considered it. For a second. But, no. He couldn’t. Her family? Like, her _family_ -family? They’d want to know about him. They’d want to know how they met. They’d want to get to know the guy that their baby girl was running off to New York with. He wasn’t ready for that.

The water got hot and Tommy finally replied, “Ah, I don’t think so. Maybe next week.”

Lucy gave him another squeeze and withdrew her hands from where her fingers were lightly caressing his stomach. “Yeah. OK, Tommy.”

 

First thing on the itinerary was getting himself a phone. Just a cheap piece of shit from Walmart. The sales guy tried to convince Tommy to get some bullshit that had a keyboard that slid out from under the screen, but Tommy wasn’t having it. He was successfully talked into a phone that was all screen, but only because the flip phone version didn’t have solitaire and Minesweeper on it. Tommy walked out of the store with a 4-pack of boxer briefs, his first cellphone in a year, and a giant plastic bottle of blue-flavored Gatorade.

Back at his place, he cracked open the Gatorade and tried to figure out his new phone. Lucy had written her number down for him — ages ago now, after that night at the Chinese food place — so he collected it from his nightstand, where he’d put it for safekeeping. Very carefully, he typed it into the phone.

Then, Lucy’s voice was on the other end. “Tommy?”

“Yeah, hey,” he smiled, feeling like an idiot. “How did you know it was me?”

Lucy said, with a light laugh, “Because I gave you my number … and also I could hear you getting mad at the phone. But you figured it out!”

“Yeah, I got it,” he admitted with a groan. “Anyway, hi.”

“Hi.”

“How’s it going?” He been with her only a few hours before, so he felt dumb. Calling was dumb. He didn’t have anything to say, really. He just wanted to hear her voice.

“It’s good. Getting some stuff for dinner,” Lucy replied matter-of-factly, and sure enough, he could hear the sound of registers on her end of the line.

“Oh, yeah, actually ... I was thinking about dinner,” he started, because he had been. Maybe he just needed to suck it up and have dinner with Lucy’s people. If they were going to have any kind of a future together, he’d need to make an effort with her family. “If I’m still invited, I was thinking—”

“It’s OK, Tommy,” she interrupted. “It’s no big deal. You don’t have to come.”

“I know it’s not a big deal. I know I don’t have to. I just thought —”

“Actually ... Tommy, I’ve been thinking, too.” She her tone took a turn more serious.

Tommy’s heart sank. _Oh no._

“Lucy, wait —” he started, trying to head her off before she said it. But it was too late.

“I think maybe this New York thing is a bad idea.” Her voice didn’t sound certain, exactly, but she also sounded like she had been thinking about it.

A “bad idea.” His bad idea that he had and then said out loud.

“Oh,” Tommy said, flatly. He was so confused. She’d just left and it was good. Why was it a bad idea all of a sudden?  “Lucy, what happened?”

“I mean, I don’t think either of us are really ready for that.” She was talking to him like he wasn’t even in the conversation. She was telling him something. Not asking.

“But, I am. I told you, I’m ...” He swallowed his words down hard. Not “ready for that,” she said. Who was ever ready for anything? “Where are you right now?” Tommy asked abruptly, standing up. “I don’t want to do this over the phone.”

“I told you, I’m at a store,” Lucy sighed. She sounded like she did outside the gym, when she was only barely tolerating his craziness. Like she wanted him to fuck off. “Tommy, don’t come here. I can’t see you right now.”

“You don’t want to _see me_? Lucy, what are you talking about? What did I do?” Tommy’s heart rate sped up as the panic set in. “Is this about last night?”

“No, baby, I told you, it’s not. I mean, it isn’t NOT about last night — it’s about all of it,” Lucy explained. Tommy pictured her in the checkout line, breaking his pounding heart in front of all the gossip magazines like it was something she did every day. Like he was nothing to her. “You don’t even know where I live, Tommy. Like, you’ve never asked. Isn’t that weird? I went from staying at your house to …”

She trailed off and it hit Tommy like a brick. He’d never asked, it was true. She was just there, with him, and then she wasn’t. And then she was gone, and he missed her, so he got drunk and then she was there again. Like magic.

“Where are you staying, then?” he blustered, like it would change anything. “Why don’t you want to see me?”

"Tommy, stop. _Escuchame_ : I don’t want to see you right now because every time I see you, we end up —” Lucy’s voice dropped to a whisper before she continued, “ _We end up in bed together._ I didn’t come to your house to get with you last night. It wasn’t even on my mind, but then … you know …”

Struck speechless, he could hear his uneven breath coming back through his own earpiece. He sounded like an angry bull. She wasn’t wrong, though — they really did always end up fucking … but he thought they were both into it. Hearing otherwise felt like nothing short of a betrayal.

“Tommy, don’t be mad. All that stuff I said after last night, about you needing support, or help or whatever, and me caring for you, I mean all that. Still. But, like, I have my own stuff going on, too? I’m OK with just being with you, like _only you_ — this isn’t about that. But, ugh … _lo ciento_. We always just go straight from talking to banging. We don’t even go out together. The one time I came to see you at the gym, you freaked out at me. It’s, like, when we’re not together, I’m nothing to you. I don’t exist. So, when you said the thing about New York, I was really —”

Tommy steeled himself. He had to cut her off. “No, it’s fine. You don’t need to —”

“Tommy.”

“You don’t need to keep going. I get it. You have your own thing going on. I’m in your way.”

“It’s not like that. You want me to _quit my job_ , though, baby. It’s not fair.”

They were both quiet for a while. In the background, he could hear voices speaking in Spanish. Lucy must have covered the phone because he heard only her muffled reply, _Just a minute. I’ll be right there. Yeah, it’s OK._

Tommy shook his head. It wasn’t OK. It was fucked. After another moment, once he could hear she was back on the phone, he said, quietly, “I’m gonna let you go, then.”

“Tommy. Wait. I love being with you. I just —”

“It’s OK, Lucy. I’ll talk to you later.” He moved the phone away from his ear and glared at the screen, trying to figure out how to end the call.

“Baby, I —” Lucy’s voice, small and far away, sounded just as he found the hangup button and ended the call.

 

* * *

Once the Greyhound bus left Illinois and crossed into Indiana, Tommy called Pilar. Now he had two numbers stored in his phone. Gettin’ crowded in the ol’ Samsung. He swallowed two more pills with the last of that blue Gatorade and tucked the phone inside his raised sweatshirt hood, holding it between his ear and his shoulder.

It didn’t take long to get out of Chicago. He didn’t have much to pack: one duffel bag, one small backpack, and whatever he could stuff in his sweatshirt pocket. He left the apartment keys and a hundred dollars in twenties on the counter to cover the cleaners and however much it cost his landlord to take everything else he left behind to the curb. Another $80 for a bus ticket and $10 in snacks left him with about $50 cash. Total.

What the fuck was he thinking, that he could have gone to New York with that? With fifty bucks? That wasn’t shit. He’d have to stay in a shelter. He’d have nothing — just a vague promise that Lucy would come when she was ready, and a dwindling supply of pills. In essence, he wouldn’t have squat.

“Tommy, _espere_ — she broke up with you?” Pilar’s voice on the line was soothing. It was almost like talking to Manny. Fuck, he missed talking to Manny.

“Something like that, yeah,” he admitted, turning in his seat until his back was to the person in the spot next to him.

“Over the _phone_?” Pilar didn’t sound like she could believe it. She and Manny fought like cats and dogs but never in ten thousand lifetimes would either of them fight or split up over the phone. That’s just not how things were done. Manny would have probably even liked a clean and easy way out of a fight, once in a while, but Pilar would have taken him apart. Manny didn’t go there. Pilar didn’t take shit from him and they were both the better for it.

“She did, yeah. I mean, she didn’t say ‘I am breaking up with you,’ but I think that was the general idea.”

In the background, Tommy could hear Pilar and Manny’s son, Junior, singing along to a cartoon theme song. He wished, deeply, that he was on a bus to El Paso to see them. But that would be a mistake. Who knew if the Corps would look for him there, but it’s not like they wouldn’t check Manny’s widow’s place eventually. He couldn’t provide for her family, anyway, and other than doing a little work around the house, he’d just be another burden.

“You weren’t together for very long, no?”

Tommy sighed, “Not for very long. A month or something.”

“But you love her?” When Tommy didn’t respond, Pilar clucked her tongue and sighed, “You do. I can tell. Oh, _muy triste_ , Tommy! How did you meet her?”

He couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t say it. That’s how it occurred to him that Lucy was fucking right, all along: He wouldn’t accept her. He was ashamed of himself, of her, of how they met.

“It’s a long story,” he lied. It wasn’t a long story. It wouldn’t even fill a hotel notepad, that’s how short that story was. “But, hey, she’s Latina.” He didn’t know why he said that. Just wanted to change the subject and figured that Pilar would get a kick out of it.

And she did. Pilar’s voice changed pitch as she laughed, sounding tickled, “Is she! _Una Mexicana, como yo_? Why didn’t you say?! Tommy, I swear, I had no idea — you wouldn’t let me set you up with my friend that one time!”

Tommy chuckled at the memory. Years ago, right after boot camp, she wanted to set him up with one of her friends but, unbeknownst to Pilar, Manny had talked him out of it, saying the girl had already seen a picture of him and said she wanted him to fill her up with babies. If there was anything that Tommy Conlon wasn’t interested in at 19, it was siring a bunch of brats that he’d never see or know with a woman he didn’t even know if he’d like.

“Yeah, yeah, I remember. Anyway, her name’s Lucy — Lucinda. Laboy, I think. Am I saying that right?” Her surname only came up once, which, in retrospect, was only further proving Lucy’s point that they didn’t really know each other that well, other than sex. She also thought his name was Riordan. So, there was that.

“ _Laboy_? _Ese es un nombre raro_!” Pilar exclaimed, surprised. She paused for a second and then gasped, “Oh, _ella es_ _puertorriqueña._  I got all excited, thinking she was Mexican.”

Tommy had to admit, he didn’t know where her family was from. She spoke Spanish a lot and had brown skin and dark hair. Once again, he hadn’t asked any further but she hadn’t volunteered, either. Puerto Rican, though. He should have known that. He should have gone to dinner at her cousin’s place.

“Sorry to get your hopes up. Doesn’t matter anyway. It’s over. I’m on the bus,” he sighed, closing his eyes against the flat, shitty grayness outside Gary, Indiana. Highways, freeways, nothing but cars and asphalt. “I just wanted you to know my number. Call me. Whenever. I mean it.”

Pilar’s breath hitched. She was starting to get choked up again. It happened every time they talked. It was never good news when he called, either. Why couldn’t he call her with something good to say? They used to laugh about stupid shit all the time. But now, there was always this terrible sadness between them.  

“I know, you are, Tommy. I’m glad you called. And I’m glad you’re going home.”

“‘Home,’” Tommy snorted into the phone, unable to stop himself. “Right. I haven’t been there in 14 years.”

“You need to be with your family again, Tommy,” she advised. She’d said it before, and wouldn’t hear any argument from him to the contrary. And he did argue, but she didn’t give a shit if Tommy didn’t consider Brendan and Paddy to be his family anymore. She knew the truth, and wouldn’t let him forget it. “We all need family, Tommy. Even you.”

It’s not like he had a choice. Where else could he go? He had no money, no work, no nothing. He was AWOL, friendless, and fucked up.

Tommy pressed his free hand against his eyes and grimaced. He was going to lose it. On the goddamned bus and everything — he was going to fucking lose it and then he’d end up in the news as some crazy vet on the Greyhound. There would be news helicopters and they’d take him away in a straitjacket if they didn’t just shoot his ass first.

He kept losing everyone that meant something to him, over and over. As soon as he let down his guard, as soon as he revealed himself to someone, they were fucking out of there. Over and over and over again, it proved itself to be a fact. Sometimes he managed to lose them first, like pre-emptive strike, but the loss was there nonetheless.

But not Pilar. He’d never lose Pilar and she’d never lose him, either. She was the only one he could really count on to accept him for who he really was. And Pilar’s voice … it was like his conscience bubbling up, regardless of how much he tried to stuff it down. However many ways he tried to smother it — with fighting, and pills and booze, and more recently, with sex — it kept coming back up, though. God damn it, if it didn’t just always resurface.

“Tommy, just breathe, honey. It’s going to be OK. We love you. The kids and me, we love you.” Pilar knew, like she always did, that Tommy was barely hanging on. She might be tiny and frazzled and always giggling like a little girl, but she was stronger than him by a long shot.

He breathed. In, out. In, out. Hold it. Hold it. In, out. Between the pills and the breathing, he could probably stave off a full-on panic attack on bus transit.

Just eleven more hours to go.

Just eleven more hours and he’d be in Pittsburgh.

Just eleven more hours and he’d stop in to see what Paddy Conlon had to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it! That takes us up to canon! 
> 
> There's a bonus round coming, in which Lucy finally gets to talk. 
> 
> Pack your bags, because we're going to Atlantic City!


	7. Bonus Round: Lucy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucy Laboy tells us what happened next. And after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience. Here's your epilogue! At least, here's the version that I decided to publish after agonizing over it for weeks and weeks, haha. <3

****  
[[Art by Zigster](https://66.media.tumblr.com/ac03aa456733061e8598b929ed9afba3/tumblr_pplpnyErbe1x9drd0o1_1280.pnj)]  
  
  
Lucy

“Don’t get her started,” Sasha, Lucy’s roommate of one full year, warned her friend, Dougie, after he asked about Lucy’s boyfriend. About Tommy. “She won’t shut up about him. Trust me.”

Lucy laughed and rolled from her back onto her front with a hiss, sweating like crazy and maybe starting to get a little August sunburn. The Greenpoint Tanning Club, Brooklyn’s finest tanning club, was in session, as it was every Wednesday afternoon when she and Sasha — the only two members of the Greenpoint Tanning Club — didn’t have classes to get to.

“ _Damelo_ ,” she whined at Dougie, stretching her arm out and wiggling her fingers at the bucket of cold drinks they’d painstakingly hauled up to the roof of their building.

Dougie handed her a Diet Coke, and asked anyway, “No, I want to know. So, you broke up with him but you went to see him fight anyway?”

Lucy cracked open the soda and drank half of it before answering. “I mean, I didn’t ‘break up with him,’ but he thought I did, and then I didn’t hear from him for months. Somebody told me he was fighting in Atlantic City, so I went.”

Dougie was very into how “street” it was that Lucy’s boyfriend was in prison. That’s how rich kids were, Lucy figured — didn’t matter if it was Chicago or New York City. Anything that made life more real, more authentic, was so foreign to them that they tripped all over themselves just to be near it. Lucy was pretty sure that Sasha would flip her shit if she knew how Lucy saved up enough money to pay for their whole apartment deposit on her own, and Dougie would probably come in his shorts.

“And then what happened?” Dougie prodded.

“He knocked three guys out, and then he lost the fourth fight,” Lucy answered tonelessly. “The guy fought dirty, and he lost.”

Tommy did more than lose. He got his shit really fucked up, he cried on TV, his shoulder was totally demolished, and then, to top it all off, he was taken into custody by the military police. Lucy could still see his face in her mind’s eye as he asked the MPs for permission to say goodbye to her in the locker room. He called her his “girlfriend” for the first time, in front of the MPs and his dad, and even the Sparta staff medic that was looking at Tommy’s shoulder.

They only got a couple of minutes around the corner in a shower stall for privacy, and all they did in there was kiss and cry, but it sealed Lucy’s fate for the next 18 months: She was almost definitely going to be the only girl in her class at FIT whose boyfriend was in prison for desertion.

“You don’t have to wait for me,” Tommy told her, his face all puffy and swollen, sweat and blood drying on his skin. “But …”

“It’d be nice?” Lucy offered, finishing his sentence with a joke that wasn’t really a joke, before they went back to kissing and not talking.

“I meant before _that_ ,” Dougie insisted. “Did you guys hook up before they hauled him off?”

Lucy raised her head to squint at Dougie. Rude. _Did they hook up?_ Pfft. She wouldn’t answer that with any sort of response. But her mind immediately went right back to Atlantic City.

The girls waiting for Tommy, who would eventually get matching T-shirts and call themselves “Tommy’s Girls,” gradually thinned out in numbers, until the lobby of his hotel was almost entirely empty — and the hotel bar, too. Lucy’s beloved cousin, Raquel — Raqui — left, too, fed up and bored with gambling while waiting for Lucy as she waited for Tommy.

Lucy rewatched and rewatched the video that was up popping up on ESPN and CNN: Tommy, at war. Tommy in the dark, saving soldiers. So, when her phone rang, interrupting the video, Lucy jumped like she’d been shocked in the _culo_. She stared at the unfamiliar number on the screen — it had to be Tommy. Who else would call her just before dawn in Atlantic City? Who would be such an old man to call her over voice, instead of just sending a text message like a normal human being?

There was a long silence before she heard him clear his throat and ask, “Lucy?”

“Hi, baby,” Lucy replied without hesitating, unable to keep happiness from turning her voice into a breathless squeak.

“You still at the bar?”

“What? I’m at Resorts — by reception.” She was confused — how did he know where she was?

“OK. Stay put,” Tommy instructed, his voice low. “I see you.”

 _Oh god,_ she thought when she heard a coin payout in the background on his end, _he was in the casino_. Right around the corner. Had he walked past her? Seen her moping around in the bar?

It wasn’t ten seconds before she spotted Tommy — in jeans and a dark blue, long-sleeve shirt, with his giant shoulders and that funny swagger — coming toward her like no time had passed and it was nothing. Abandoning her bag and her heels at the bar, Lucy ran the fifteen feet to the small stairs leading up to the hotel bar and launched herself at Tommy. He caught her easily, trapping her in a crushing hug that knocked the wind out of her lungs. Lucy smashed her lips against the thick muscles of Tommy’s neck and started to cry.

“”You were in the casino this whole time? You saw me?” Lucy sniffled, smiling through her tears as she slid down the front of his body until her feet were back on the floor. He smelled so good: clean, sort of. Better.

“Sorry,” he confessed, not answering her question. “It’s been a weird night.”

Lucy agreed with a nod. So weird. But it didn’t matter now. “Baby, I can’t believe you’re here,” she choked, pulling back to look at him. There was not a scratch on him, even though he’d been fighting the scariest guys in the world. She’d watched from high in the stands, totally in awe, as he knocked the first two guys he fought out cold in one go.

Keeping his arms around her shoulders, Tommy pulled away just enough to look Lucy over in return. With a small, satisfied grunt of approval, and the flicker of a tiny smile, he replied, “I can’t believe _you’re_ here. You look good.”

Lucy lifted herself onto her toes, just enough that she could kiss him quickly. “Thanks. I know, I’m crazy. I missed you too much.”

He briefly returned the kiss, but pulled back to check with her: “You came here for me?”

“Yes!” Lucy assured him, smiling. “Why else would I come here? To lose all my money? I came here to see you, baby.”

“To see me fight?”

“To _see you._ ”

“By yourself?”

She shook her head. “I’m here with my cousin, Raqui.”

Tommy, briefly amused, snorted, “Your cousin’s name is Rocky?”

“No, _Raqui_ — Raquel,” Lucy laughed. “She got sick of waiting for me, so she went back to our room.”

Tommy brought her closer with a slight squeeze. His voice low, he glanced around as if he was checking for eavesdroppers. “So, then, we can’t go to your room, is what you’re saying?”

Lucy shook her head, giggling. First, her cousin was sleeping, and second, Tommy hadn’t been in contact for months and now he thought he was was just going to sweep her off her feet and get right into bed with her?

Well, yeah — he was. But before _that_ happened, they had to talk. Lucy would insist on it.

She suggested, “What about your room? We’re in your hotel.”

Tommy groaned and released her from his hug, pausing to wipe at the corner of one of his eyes with a loosely curled fist. He looked even more tired than she felt — which was really, really tired. Licking his lips, he paused before before answering grimly, “That’s part of what I have to talk to you about.”

* * *

Lucy was surprised that they made it from the bar through the lobby and into the hall with all the elevators without stopping to make out again, but Tommy led her by the hand with determination, head ducked down, not looking anywhere but the path ahead of him, like somebody was after him.

But as soon as the elevator door closed, he was pulling her to him and they were kissing for real. Holding her head firmly, with his fingers tucked into her hair and thumbs against the hinge of her jaw, he brought her into a hot, deep kiss that immediately turned the rest of her body into molten honey.

Withdrawing from the kiss half-breathless as the elevator slowed to a stop, Lucy whispered, “Tommy, wait. You were in the Marines?”

With a frustrated groan, Tommy retreated to the other side of the mirrored elevator and nodded blankly to her in response. He waited until the elevators opened to no one and took a quick glance down the corridor before he answered: “Yeah.”

“Did you—”

“Lucy,” he interrupted, keeping his voice low. “You gotta until we get to the room. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

The elevator doors slid closed and they both went for each other again. The sequel was even better, and Lucy pressed her whole body against him until the elevator chimed and the doors opened again. They stepped away from each other, but this time, Tommy grabbed her hand again and led her down a long hallway.

Lucy dug her heels when he stopped in front of a door, before he could get the keycard out from his pocket of his jeans. She objected, “I don’t want to just go to bed with you like last time. We gotta talk, Tommy.”

He nodded quickly. “I know. I’ll tell you in the room. We have to be quiet — the old man is sleeping.”

“What old man?”

“My coach.”

“Your coach is an old man?”

Tommy opened the door and put his finger to his lips to quiet her. The common room in the suite was empty and the door to one of the bedrooms was shut. The other one, the one with the open door, was Tommy’s. He took her in and gently clicked the door closed behind him.

He immediately answered, in a hushed tone, “Pops. My father.”

Lucy processed that knowledge, trying to remember what Tommy had said about his father. His mom was _muerto_. His brother, too. But she didn’t remember anything about his dad.

Were they going to have sex in a room next to his father? How?

_Very quietly, that’s how._

“OK,” she urged him to continue. “What does that mean?”

Tommy sat her down on the bed and stood stiffly in front of her, like he was being interrogated or making a speech at a funeral or something. “Nothing,” he sighed. After a deep breath, he rattled off why his night was so weird. “I was a dick to him earlier, in the casino. I got the note you left at the front desk, and I saw you sitting in the bar, but I needed to think so I was playing some slots, you know? And then, Pops showed up and wanted to talk about the video. He was just ... up in my shit. I was trying to figure out if I should call you or not and he wanted to know about what happened in country. Lucy, I haven’t seen him since I was 14, when I left with my mom. ”

“Your mom —” Lucy interrupted. That was probably the most Tommy had ever said to her, but she had to know: “She passed?”

His eyes told her it was the truth. “Yeah, she died a few years after we left Pops.”

“So, you, your mom, and your brother left him?” Lucy was trying, desperately, to piece it together.

Tommy flinched, guilty of something that Lucy couldn’t guess at. He cocked his head and grimaced. “Just me and my mom. My brother stayed in Pittsburgh.”

“And then _he_ passed? Oh, god, Tommy.” Her mind was whirling. He’d been through too much.

With a sigh, Tommy squatted all the way down, elbows on his knees, to look up at Lucy with an apologetic frown. “My brother, Brendan — he didn’t die. He stayed.”

Lucy set her jaw and folded her arms across her chest defensively. “You lied to me about your brother dying? That’s fucked up.”

Tommy’s almost looked angry for a second, like the thought was revolting to him, but then his eyes got wetter and he explained: “No, my _other_ brother, in the Corps — he’s the one who died. Manny. In January.”

Lucy’s heart was suddenly lodged so high up in her throat, she could almost taste it. She was totally, completely, undeniably unequipped to help him through this. This wasn’t crying in the closet after a bad dream; this was the real shit.

Tommy went on, “Manny’s wife, Pilar, she’s in Texas. I promised her and the kids ...”

When he trailed off, Lucy uncrossed her arms and held them out to him, urging him to join her on the bed. He moved toward her on his knees and rested his head on her lap, holding her around the hips.

“I’m sorry, Tommy,” she whispered.

“Yeah, me too.” He nuzzled his nose and lips against the fabric of her new dress. Grumbling, he added, “It gets worse. I’m just going to tell you all of it, OK?”

First, a good thing: If he won the tournament, which was the plan, he would give all the prize money to Manny’s widow, Pilar. She needed it, for her and for the kids, and he sure didn’t need it where he was going. But he’d tell her more about that in a second.

Second, his long-lost brother — the alive one, Brendan — was also in the tournament and it was looking more and more like Tommy was going to have to fight him. There was a lot of family shit that he really didn’t want to deal with. A lot of anger.

Lucy looked down at his head resting gingerly in her lap. She knew his rage was there, even in calm moments like that. She felt it. His eyes were closed as he spoke, and she saw that his lashes were longer than any tough guy ever could need. He looked like a little boy in a man’s body — a giant _nene_. She lightly ran her fingers over his brow bone, and waited for him to finish.

“Third ... Lucy, I’m going to prison,” Tommy mumbled, keeping his eyes closed.

She only barely held back a sob, feeling like all the air had been sucked out of the room. “Why?” she asked, her voice trembling.

“Well, the Marine Corps don’t really like it when you leave — especially during combat,” he answered, his face staying passive, like he was just telling her that the sky was blue or rain was wet. “I just fuckin’ walked away. After Manny died. I took off.”

“And they’d send you to jail for that?” Lucy choked. “But you saved those guys! In the tank!”

“Prison,” he corrected. “And yeah, I did, but they’re going to put me away anyway, Lucy,” Tommy sighed, opening his eyes and rotating his head so he could look up at her.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen, baby, but they’re definitely coming for me. As soon as that kid put that video up, it was over. This kind of shit doesn’t really blow over.”

“What are you going to do?” Her voice was getting shaky as she choked up again. _Hold it together,_ she thought. _Keep it together._

Tommy rose up off his knees, until he was seated on the bed next to her and taking Lucy into his arms.

He didn’t say anything for the duration of time it took Lucy to take several deep breaths. Tommy soothed them both by playing his fingers through her hair, as he squeezed her to him. Reticent, he mumbled into her ear, “I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that before, in Chicago — that I didn’t tell you any of this before.”

“I love you, too, baby,” she sniffled, squeezing him tightly. And she did love him. But, as it turned out, loving someone wasn’t enough to fix everything that was broken — no matter what movies tried to make people think. “But I don’t know what to do.”

“You don’t need to do anything, baby. This is not your problem.” Swiping his thumb at a tear that had made it down to her chin, he changed the subject. “Hey, are you in New York yet?”

Lucy shook her head and pressed her face into his hand. “Next month.”

Tommy seemed to like that. “Good. Got all your money saved up?”

“I’ll be OK,” Lucy replied absently, searching his face for what he wasn’t saying. New York was the furthest thing from her mind, which was filled up by thoughts of Tommy and what might happen next. “Are you going to win this thing later?”

He nodded solemnly and rubbed his thumb across Lucy’s lower lip, his eyes focusing on her mouth. When the fingers of his other hand moved from playing with the ends of Lucy’s hair to the small of her back, and finally settled at the curve of her hip, it was clear to her that they were done talking. She had her answers, finally, and the clock was ticking, so she leaned in and kissed him, nice and soft.

Tommy undressed Lucy carefully, slowly, reverently, in the warm light from the sunrise coming in through the sheer hotel curtains. There was nothing left of the frantic urgency of their kisses in the elevator on the way up to the room — things had changed. She knew who he was, now. She knew this might be the last time.

As he kissed the line of her collarbone to her shoulder, slowly dragging his lips over her bare skin, Lucy pushed away thoughts about what it might mean to love someone who was in prison.

When she was stripped bare, Tommy let her take his clothes off, too, starting with his shirt and ending with his jeans and boxers. When he was naked, Lucy could see how much work he’d put into getting bigger. He wasn’t just bigger, he looked healthier, somehow — no more dark circles under his eyes.

They sprawled out naked on the bed, kissing and switching positions multiple times, until Tommy was on top of Lucy. She could feel his cock, hard and hot, against her thigh, and the tension in his upper body as he held her like she was something precious, important. Like maybe this was the last time.

When she went down on him, she did her absolute best, kneading his balls and keeping her tongue in constant motion as she sucked him. He reciprocated by licking his way down her body, starting at her earlobes, pausing at her nipples and belly, and then settling between her legs. He was tender with her, gently holding her hips and ass in his strong hands, kissing her pussy until she was sweating and messy under his fingers.

When Lucy opened her legs wide for him, pulling at his shoulders, Tommy rose up and moved up until she was able bring her knees up around his hips. As he rubbed his cock against her wetness, he pulled his head back to study her face.

“What if this is it?” Tommy asked, in a near-whisper. That tough exterior cracked open just enough that she could see he was scared, vulnerable.

“It won’t be, baby,” Lucy softly assured him. “But ... just in case, we should do it real good.”

He eagerly pressed his mouth to hers, gently licking his tongue into her mouth at the same time he pressed up and into her. Tommy kissed her more intensely when she inhaled sharply at the sensation of his dick squeezing inside, and didn’t ease off even when he was in. He filled her, slowly, still holding the kiss, and moving gently against Lucy until he was buried deep in her center.

With a low, disjointed moan, Tommy broke the kiss and slumped against her for a moment, laying his forehead against hers. With the full weight of him resting against her torso, Lucy felt entirely pinned beneath his solid frame, but it felt good — secure, somehow.

They didn’t have a lot of time. It was morning already. She wanted nothing more than to stay like that — connected, safe — as long as possible. Fall asleep like that. Wake up like that.

“You miss this? You miss me?” Lucy whispered into Tommy’s ear, twisting her head so she could nuzzle the side of his face.

He groaned as he pressed into her and eased out of her in a slow, easy rhythm. “I missed everything, baby.”

Lifting off Lucy a bit, he held himself up on one elbow so he could twist to the side and hold her open by the knee with his opposite hand. He was gentler than he had been ever before, and kept full eye contact with her as they fucked. What a difference from their first time, when he made her turn her eyes away from him. Of all the things that she’d ever done as an escort, that request made her the most sad. But now, her escort life was totally over, behind her, and sex with Tommy was different now. His expression was hard to read; Lucy imagined maybe it was also sadness, but then it dawned on her: it was love.

Most guys just wanted to fuck like Tommy fought: hard and fast and brutal. But Tommy wasn’t like that in bed with her, especially not that time in Atlantic City. He was so tender and sweet. Lucy was surprised, then, to find herself sliding into a sneaky but full orgasm. It hardly ever happened like that — coming without touching herself. When she opened her eyes after her body stopped writhing, Tommy looked so proud of himself that she almost cried.

When he came, it wasn’t long after — his breathing heavy and hot, and then he was shuddering inside of her, and out, until he was totally spent. After, he stayed inside her until his breathing slowed and his body softened when he fell into a deep sleep.

Nothing lasts forever, Lucy remembered thinking. At least, nothing good. They couldn’t even sleep for long, not with the sun coming in the windows like that. And not with all that noise. Someone nearby, a man, was yelling about a ship.

* * *

After that, everything got super weird and went too fast. The Marines were in the audience — Lucy was pretty sure it was all of them — singing their theme song for Tommy. That should have been a good thing, and everyone acted like it was, but Lucy finally knew why it wasn’t.

Everything was happening just as Tommy said it would. It was just a matter of time before all those soldiers found out they were singing for a deserter. And then the third fight happened, and it was brutal, terrible, violent. They had to basically pull Tommy off Mad Dog like he was the mad dog himself. Lucy was headed toward the passageway leading to the locker rooms, Raqui in tow, before the crowd had even stopped roaring.

Tommy didn’t want to talk. He was coiled and tense, even as he stretched and sweated in his giant hooded sweatshirt, slamming bottle after bottle of water. He was friendly enough to Raquel, and tried to be affectionate with Lucy, but after the big fight between Koba and Brendan Conlon started playing on the TV set up in the locker room, he barely looked away from it.

Lucy stayed quiet, even though it was killing her to not explain to her cousin why he was so interested in seeing Brendan Conlon’s fight, or why he was jumpy about the presence of the Marines, why he was so savage with Mad Dog, why his trainer wasn’t there. Lucy had Tommy’s secrets now, too, and it sucked.

But then, the fight was over, and Brendan was the unlikely champion. Before Lucy could even ask if Tommy was happy to not have to fight the giant Koba, a news segment interrupted the Sparta coverage — an interview with Pilar Fernandez, who Lucy gathered was married to Tommy’s friend who died. Tommy’s biggest secrets became public knowledge.

Almost everything bad had already happened already, but Tommy had only begun to pay the price.

 

Three months of Tommy being held in the brig in Arlington while he awaited his court martial. It was a tough call for the higher-ups, he said: He was a deserter, as he freely admitted to, but he’d had a perfect, exemplary record before he took off, with at least a dozen commendations. Then there was the issue of the rescue of the guys in the tank. Everyone saw that when it was all over the news. Everyone knew he was a Marine that almost won Sparta, that he fought his estranged brother. And everyone saw his breakdown right after. It wasn’t going to look good for the Corps if they made an example out of Tommy and had him breaking rocks in jail for the rest of his life. In the end, anyway, it was friendly fire that had killed his whole unit. Tommy wasn’t the only fuck-up. There were petitions on Facebook, calling for leniency. Tommy’s fans, including the ones from Sparta who called themselves “Tommy’s Girls,” rallied to appeal to the court of public opinion, saying that Tommy was a good guy in a bad situation. They weren’t wrong.

So, when the verdict came down, it wasn’t a complete shock that it was pretty lenient: 24 months in the prison at Camp Pendleton, in max security, stripped of all rank. Eligible for early release with good conduct, which was a relief. He told Lucy that he wouldn’t be eligible for the boot camp program because the Marines had no intention of counting him as enlisted after his time was served, but he was fortunate to be given an “other than honorable” discharge, in the end. He could keep his benefits. He wouldn’t be a Marine anymore, but after what he’d been through, he said that was OK with him.

* * *

 

“Of course they hooked up in Atlantic City, you dumdum,” Sasha scolded Dougie. “She’s his _girlfriend_? Luce, you gotta show him a photo. He’s insanely fucking hot. Come on —show us the one with his shirt off.”

Lucy rolled her eyes. That was definitely not happening. She didn’t have any super recent photos anyway. It’s not like Tommy had access to a cell phone at Camp Pendleton. At least not normally.

Pendleton sounded to Lucy like a nice and made-up place before she visited him for his 6-month mark. It wasn’t nice at all — it was a prison. They were allowed a brief hug at the beginning and the end of the visit, and they were allowed to hold hands as long as they kept their hands above the table, but it wasn’t at all like Lucy thought it would be. It wasn’t at all like the movies. It was frustrating and just a tease — she’d never wanted to fuck someone so badly in her life as she wanted to fuck Tommy, even in his orange jumpsuit — but it was worth the airfare and the $60 cab fare and the paperwork just to see him again, a whole nine months after Sparta.

He was in a lot of counseling, Tommy’s letters said: Anger management. Drug and alcohol. PTSD. It was boring but good, he admitted to Lucy, he was learning something. His handwritten letters weren’t all that wordy or poetic, but they were always so sweet, and usually included a little sketch of something he thought would be a good tattoo. He signed his letters, “Yours, Tommy.”

Dougie wanted to know what prison was like, too, because of course he did, but Lucy didn’t have a lot to say. She didn’t see much when she visited and he didn’t say much about it. They must have liked Tommy OK, though, because they allowed him, once a month, to have a private video chat with her. They just gave him an iPhone and told him not to do anything illegal, unless he wanted to lose his cushy privileges.

Lucy didn’t tell Dougie about that, although he probably would have enjoyed the idea of big, famously tough soldier guy, Tommy Conlon, jerking off while a naked Lucy, who used to be Tommy’s escort, staged elaborate and filthy scenes for him in her tiny bedroom with no closet. Sasha knew about the last bit, because she’d walked in on the middle of one of their calls. She said she was scarred for life and a little jealous — and really glad she didn’t understand Spanish.

 

Their plan was this: He’d be granted early release at 18 months, because he was a model prisoner just like he’d been a model Marine. He’d paid for his crime, done his time, and was in good character standing, he said.

When Tommy was released from Pendleton and the Marines, Lucy would fly out to California to meet him. They’d spend the weekend in a hotel, and fall asleep and wake up every night and morning together. Then they’d fly out to New York for a week, during which Lucy would sit on his face for no fewer than three days (at his request), and maybe get some new tattoos.

And finally, Tommy would probably go back down to Pennsylvania to find work. Maybe he’d run the gym that his brother Brendan bought to hide some of that five million dollars he’d won. Tommy wasn’t sure, yet. He even talked about going to Texas to be closer to Pilar, but he didn’t want to be that far from Lucy while she was still finishing up school in New York. The future was, however, just ahead of them. They had choices. Tommy said he was more surprised about that than anything. He said he already assumed that everything had happened already and there was nothing to look forward to.

Maybe loving somebody wasn’t enough to fix anything. All the same, though, Lucy wondered if maybe if you kept that love safe and whole, if you fought for someone even when it was hard and even if they didn’t think it was worth fighting for — and if you were really, really patient — sometimes the things that were broken just kinda fixed themselves.


End file.
